Making career growth easier to understand.
In a company of over 300 people, employees had no clear way to see what came next. I spotted the gap, secured approval and led the product from the first pitch to launch.
I saw the problem before there was a brief.
Early in my first year, I noticed that career growth was unclear for me and the people around me. When I started asking questions, even managers struggled to explain what progression looked like.
I investigated the gap, built the case for an internal tool and pitched it to stakeholders. Once it was approved, I became the only designer on the project.
Conversations depended on the manager.There was no shared structure for discussing growth.
The requirements were hard to navigate.The same skill could appear across several levels, with different expectations.
What I looked into
I spoke with five managers and looked at six large Croatian companies. None of the six had an internal tool for career development. The alternatives I reviewed were broader HR tools.
I also explored what employees, managers and HR needed at different career stages. Employees needed direction, managers needed consistency, and HR needed a system they could maintain.
Give people a place to start.
I organised the product around three areas: Profile, Career Paths and Job Search. Each gave employees a different way into the same question: what can I do next?
This separated personal progress, role requirements and other opportunities into clear places.
Make the levels readable.
One requirement could span three levels, becoming more demanding at each stage. Showing every requirement at every level made the first version look like a spreadsheet.
I worked with HR to decide what should be visible first. The level system gave people a starting point, while nearby levels showed how expectations changed.
See an early exploration
I started with low-fidelity layouts to check the structure before developing the visual design.
Design with the team who would run it.
HR would own the platform after launch, so I brought them into every major decision. We worked through what to show and how to organise the requirements.
I led the design and worked with engineering and stakeholders throughout. HR's ongoing involvement kept the product connected to the way career conversations would actually happen.
HR put it into practice.
HR used the platform as the foundation for structured career-development workshops. It also gave managers and employees a shared reference for end-of-year reviews.
These numbers show adoption. They do not, on their own, show whether people progressed faster.
The hardest part was choosing what to show.
Finding the problem and getting support for it mattered as much as the screens. The design became clearer once I stopped trying to show every requirement at once.
Working closely with HR helped me make those decisions without losing the detail the framework needed.