Product Strategy and Management: Building a Social Intranet

Goal: Conceptualize and manage development of a platform tying together all internal resources used by a global agency

After building a content management platform that allowed for user-generated content and implementing Yammer, we realized that we needed to round out our ecosystem with an intranet that tied all the different pieces together and made the 100+ websites we have internally, added with the hundreds of tools we use globally, easily accessible.

But we didn’t want just another static website — armed with social tools like Yammer, we wanted to make sure that social and the transparency Yammer empowered ran through every aspect of users’ experience. I led the strategy and development of our phased social intranet, which involved:

• Getting buy-in and alignment across our global leadership team
• Leading agency-wide surveys to determine what users were actually looking for in an internal resource (a first)
• Delivering initial wire-frames to help envision what the platform would look like
• Working across business groups to identify and link the most relevant resources
• Managing developers and designers to make sure work was delivered on-time and within budget, and that it evolved in a way that made the most sense for our users (we delivered the project within budget (5% to spare) and ahead of schedule by one day)

The result was a site that is now widely used across the agency, and has increased usage/traffic to our internal resources by nearly 50% (of those we can track).