Project overview
Role: Senior Product Designer (IC, high ownership)
Partners: Staff UX Researcher, Principal PM
Scope: Discovery with 15 customer companies, 28 interviewees, 1,200 minutes of interviews
Hero summary
Most organizations can collect employee feedback. Far fewer can credibly act on it.
In this discovery, I helped uncover why listening programs stall, reframed the problem from surveys to in-the-flow signals, and shaped a buildable direction centered on closing the loop: Listen → Understand → Share → Act → Iterate.
[MEDIA PLACEHOLDER: Hero visual]
Signals (direct + indirect + behaviors) → Themes → Close-the-loop cycle (Listen → Understand → Share → Act → Iterate)
1) Context
When I joined ServiceNow as a Design Lead, Listening Posts was the first space I truly owned. It was exciting, but also intense. Employee Experience was becoming a serious investment area, and I needed to ramp fast, earn trust, and bring clarity in a domain full of opinions.
At first glance, Listening Posts looked like a familiar problem: surveys, questions, dashboards.
Then we started talking to customers.
Again and again, we heard a version of the same line:
“We ask employees for feedback. We analyze it. And then… nothing really happens.”
That “nothing” is where trust breaks. People stop participating, leaders stop believing the program works, and listening becomes performative.
Design question
How might we help People Orgs listen in time, understand the signal, and close the loop with credible communication and action?
[MEDIA PLACEHOLDER: Adoption barriers pyramid]
Caption: Customers described four layers of barriers that determine whether listening sticks, from culture to prioritization.
2) What we proved in discovery
The discovery wasn’t about what people prefer. It was about constraints that show up in real organizations.
Privacy is global, but must be configured locally: anonymized aggregation plus controlled segmentation
Frontline access is a real constraint: not everyone has a desk or email, listening must meet employees where they work
Closing the loop is the trust hinge: communication and follow-through determines whether employees keep engaging
Action and accountability are the hardest part: teams struggle to translate insights into accountable actions, often tracking work offline
What stood out to me was the gap between intention and reality. People Orgs genuinely wanted to do right by employees. They just didn’t have a system that made follow-through easy.
3) Turning point 1: The day “survey-first” stopped making sense
Early on, the gravitational pull was obvious: make the survey experience better. Better templates. Better questions. Better analytics.
But a pattern kept showing up in interviews that broke this framing.
Frontline employees were often unreachable by default channels. Many did not have desks or email. Even when they did, surveys felt detached from work. It was like asking someone to reflect on their day from a distance, after the moment had passed.
That’s when the direction changed.
Instead of treating Listening Posts as surveys, we treated it as signals in the flow of work.
[MEDIA PLACEHOLDER: Signals framework]
Caption: Direct signals, indirect signals, and observable behaviors, designed to expand listening beyond surveys.
What this unlocked
A clear product direction: multi-channel delivery that fits where work happens (mobile, SMS, web, virtual agent style touchpoints), not just where HR prefers to run programs.
[MEDIA PLACEHOLDER: Moments that matter]
Caption: Listening becomes meaningful when it shows up at moments that matter: onboarding, micro-moments, milestones, transitions, exit.
4) Turning point 2: The real failure wasn’t insight. It was follow-through.
The second shift was even more important.
Most teams we spoke to could collect feedback. Many could analyze it too. The breakdown happened after the chart.
What employees wanted was simple:
“Did you hear me, and what will you do about it?”
What People Orgs struggled with was also simple, but harder:
“How do I turn this into actions that are owned, tracked, and communicated back without creating a manual mess?”
That’s when we stopped treating follow-through as a “process problem” and started treating it as a product problem.
We made the missing steps explicit: Share and Iterate.
[MEDIA PLACEHOLDER: Close-the-loop model]
Caption: Listen → Understand → Share → Act → Iterate, designed to make trust-building steps explicit and buildable.
My role and key moves (IC, high ownership)
My focus was to help the team move from raw signal to buildable direction.
Partnered with Research and PM to frame the problem as a system, not a feature
Helped structure and synthesize customer input into themes stakeholders could align on
Turned findings into clear artifacts and bets that could be validated next
[OPTIONAL: Add internal receipts later]
(Internal) I created the synthesis template used to consolidate interview signal across companies
(Internal) I facilitated the working session where we converged on the bets taken forward
(Internal) I authored the first draft of the close-the-loop framing that was adopted in the readout
6) Decisions this research influenced (what we took forward)
This discovery directly shaped what we prioritized for concept validation and direction:
In-the-flow delivery channels for surveys
Pulse surveys delivered in the context of work across mobile, SMS, web, and virtual agent style touchpoints.Action planning workflows
Action planning as a first-class workflow so teams can translate insights into accountable follow-through, not spreadsheets and slide decks.Privacy assurance as a repeatable UX moment
Privacy reassurance made explicit at the moment of feedback capture, reflecting the global yet local privacy requirement.
[MEDIA PLACEHOLDER: “What we took forward” panel]
3 tiles matching the three decisions above.
7) Outcomes (what changed because of this work)
This discovery did not just produce insights. It produced direction.
We left discovery with three buildable bets to validate next
We aligned the team around a complete closed-loop model, making Share and Iterate non-negotiable
We created a shared language (signals + moments that matter) that reduced repeated debates and improved clarity across stakeholders
What we deprioritized (placeholders, replace later)
To keep the scope focused and validation-ready, we intentionally deprioritized a few ideas during this phase.
Deprioritized: [Example: deep dashboard customization / advanced analytics]
Why: [Example: customers struggled more with follow-through than visualization depth]Deprioritized: [Example: annual census survey program builder]
Why: [Example: direction shifted to in-the-moment listening and multi-channel delivery]Deprioritized: [Example: broad persona coverage beyond People Org roles]
Why: [Example: we scoped to People Org roles first and flagged the employee lens as next discovery]
9) External validation
Listening Posts later appeared in external coverage as part of ServiceNow’s broader Employee Journey Management narrative.
ERP Today (Josh Bersin, Feb 2022) calls out Listening Posts as a capability to create short or long form surveys integrated into employee journeys.
HR Executive recognized ServiceNow Employee Journey Management as a Top HR Product for 2021, highlighting in-moment employee feedback and personalized action plans.
I was one designer on a broader product effort, and this external coverage validates the market direction the team invested in and that this discovery helped shape.
10) Why this case study belongs in my portfolio
This project was my first major ownership at ServiceNow. It’s here because it shows how I operate when the domain is messy and the stakes are real.
I ramp quickly, I find the real problem under the obvious one, and I translate complexity into direction teams can build with confidence.
