Delivery Systems
Advisory at Scale
UX Accelerator Framework
Standardized bespoke advisory into one reskinnable prototype and a fixed delivery model: four times the volume, at roughly a quarter of the delivery time, run by a team that could be handed it.
UX accelerators are sold as short, fixed-length advisory engagements, and each one was being assembled from scratch. The harder problem was the audience. Customers arrived at completely different levels of platform fluency and frequently sent both kinds of person to the same session: a process owner who owns the experience and cannot configure it, and a technical team that configures daily and does not own the experience. A delivery built for one of them loses the other. The assignment was to make the delivery scale without making it generic.
MY ROLE
UX Advisory Lead
TIMELINE
3 weeks, 4 workshops
SCOPE
Design direction already not working
I built one instrument instead of a deck per customer
The instinct in advisory work is to tailor everything, and tailoring does not scale. I had no customer instance to build in and only the publicly available demo content, so I built one prototype designed to be reskinned rather than rebuilt: same structure, same flows, the customer's identity applied on top. Public content meant no instance, no scrub, and no approval before it went in front of a customer. The deck got thinner on purpose, so the deck stopped being the deliverable and the conversation became it. That is what let the team grow from three to eight globally without delivery quality tracking the newest hire.
Basic Employee Center flow
Governance, taxonomy, and content, then the evidence for them
I fixed the delivery on three concepts because customers arrive without shared language for any of them. Governance determines who is allowed to decide, taxonomy determines whether anyone can find anything, and content is what the first two operate on. Named in that order, they give a room of process owners and engineers one vocabulary to argue in. The usage-analytics conversation comes next, deliberately before the prototype: once a customer can see how their experience is actually used, a proposed change stops being a preference and becomes a claim someone can check. After the prototype is too late, because by then the room is discussing features.
Self service with customization
I kept the prototype basic, and showed exactly one thing it could not do
An impressive prototype sets an expectation the customer's own team has to fund, and teaches them nothing about the product they already own. I built the baseline against core, out-of-the-box capability, then included one example of what a deliberate customization could add. That single contrast did the work the rest of the session could not: the process owner got a concrete picture of what they were asking for, and the implementation team got something they could scope. The conversation moved from what do we want to how far do we go and who owns it, which is the decision the accelerator exists to produce. Demand for that example outran the accelerator, so I specified it with platform architects as a scope of work that could be handed off directly.
Fully custom scoped effort flow
What I'd revisit
Putting one enhanced example next to a deliberately basic baseline made the configuration conversation concrete, and it created an expectation I could not control once the session ended. A customer who saw it could reasonably read it as included. I would now mark the boundary inside the artifact itself rather than in the talk track, so the line between core capability and configured enhancement survives being forwarded without me.
In their words
"What a great call we had with [customer] today. They were SO appreciative of what you did to help them break down their taxonomy today. The work you did to try to show them what they could do with AI and how they could lay things out and make this an easier job was KEY! I'm including a snip from the transcript, but a quote directly from the customer: 'This was really good. I think. I think this was one of the more valuable sessions we've had. This made much more sense.' GREAT JOB" - Account Team for Marquee Client
"I wanted to thank Nick for going above and beyond in piloting a session for Impact Guided customers surrounding Employee Center design from a UX perspective. This is a gap we have seen with customers who are looking to move towards the Next Experience and truly re-imagine their end-users experience. This has been so well received by customers and tremendous in helping them further adopt our newer capabilities!" - Customer Success Manager