Product HQ Capstone

Overview

• Product Name: CareerForge
• Role: Product Manager
• ‍Context: Capstone project for Product HQ
• Goal: Develop a product that streamlines career development for professionals seeking meaningful growth and planning.

Challenge Statement

Career development resources are often scattered, confusing, and generic. Furthermore, a number of professions will need to rapidly upskill considering trends in AI and automation. How might we create a personalized development experience that enables those seeking accelerated growth to achieve their career aspirations?

Solution Design

MVP Concept: CareerForge was designed as an interactive web app that guides users through a tailored journey to discover their strengths, identify career goals, and create actionable plans.

‍Key Features:

• Individualized career insights using validated personality assessment
  
• Simple, actionable development plans informed by industry experts
• Connection to industry networks and coaches to facilitate transition
  

Key Learnings

My biggest takeaways from developing the concept for CareerForge was that all of the tools and methodologies are geared to support one essential goal: solving a pain point for the customer that unlocks genuine value and has viability.

• Fall in love with the problem, not the solution
  
• Observing customer behavior trumps assumptions every time
• Fail fast, learn faster: launch with core functionality and iterate based on real feedback
  

Challenge

Evolve an established leadership framework to embrace a culture of inclusivity, psychological safety, and whole-person innovation across a diverse technology-driven organization.

Approach

We introduced Situational Leadership to the organization through a series of pilots, experimented in partnership with the pilot cohorts, and conducted follow-up to determine whether the framework was supporting our unique culture while also creating a shared leadership approach.

Findings

• By itself, Building Leaders fell short of supporting the nuanced realities of interdisciplinary teams
• Leaders needed a more adaptive approach to support innovation while providing meaningful guidance
• Maintaining innovation while providing the right level of support was a key need for the audience

Solution

We designed immersive, scenario-based labs that turned Situational Leadership into a deeply personalized experience where:

• Leaders collaboratively workshopped real challenges
• In-session coaching transformed theoretical concepts into actionable insights
  
• Role-playing scenarios were dynamically generated to reflect each team's unique context

Outcome

Our approach successfully evolved leadership practices across Exact Sciences, empowering leaders from R&D to customer service to lead with greater empathy, adaptability, and collective purpose.

Urban League of Greater Madison

Challenge

Cultivate meaningful career pathways for emerging talent during and transform a partnership from transactional to truly developmental, all during an unprecedented pandemic.

Approach

We reimagined talent development by creating an immersive experience that went beyond traditional recruitment. Our goal was to empower Urban League candidates with the skills and experiences to become emerging professionals and see themselves as contributors to our organization's mission, not just as potential employees.

Findings

• Traditional recruitment methods fall short of truly engaging emerging talent
• Candidates need more than a job description – they need a vision of their potential
• The pandemic presented an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how we connect with and prepare future professionals

Solution

We crafted an innovative virtual experience that did more than showcase a workplace – it illuminated career possibilities. By bringing candidates face-to-face with Urban League alumni now thriving in customer care, lab order entry, and specimen processing roles, we created a powerful narrative of possibility:

• Authentic conversations with current employees who shared similar backgrounds
• Guided reflective experiences that connected job opportunities to personal aspirations
• Collaborative curriculum development to better prepare candidates for success

Outcome

We evolved our partnership with the Urban League, creating a mutually transformative experience that opened new pathways for talented individuals and brought fresh perspectives into our organization.

Challenge

Reimagine career development as a dynamic, empowering journey that transforms every employee into the CEO of their own professional growth.

Approach

We designed a breakthrough framework that deconstructed traditional career planning, giving employees at all levels a powerful toolkit to discover their unique professional DNA and chart an intentional path of growth and impact.

Findings

• Career development is not a one-size-fits-all prescription, but a personalized expedition of self-discovery
• The most powerful insights emerge when individuals simultaneously look inward, outward, and across organizational landscapes
  
• True career planning requires a holistic approach that connects personal passion with organizational opportunity

Solution

We created a transformative development ecosystem that empowers employees to:

• Discover Their Drivers: A deep-dive experience helping individuals uncover the core motivations that fuel their most extraordinary work
• Look In, Look Out, Look About: An innovative framework that aligns personal strengths, industry trends, and organizational needs
  
• 70-20-10 Career Mapping: A flexible planning approach that translates insights into actionable, dynamic career trajectories

Outcome

We sparked a paradigm shift  in professional development for the organization. Employees were no longer passive recipients of career guidance, but active architects of their professional futures – deeply aligned with both their personal aspirations and the organization's evolving mission.