In my first few years at Salesforce, I lead a small skunkworks team whose charge was to look across innovation projects to assess repeatable customer needs and patterns. The most glaring challenge (ahem, opportunity)? Empowering employees.

There are all kinds of studies on the efficacy of fully engaged employees. Happy people do better work. Plain and simple. Over the course of 3 years, we concepted and designed a working prototype that demonstrated the value of an integrated human-centered experience to employee, manager, and the overall system—one that spanned recruiting, skills matching, onboarding, performance, learning, and feedback—as well as a gig-based talent marketplace.

To evolve from prototype to full-fledged product, I led our global team in a series of design sprints across New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Paris. We tapped into external and internal experts, data scientists and analytics to determine how to surface insights to managers and leaders. We solidified the technical architecture and developed a roadmap, proving undeniable business value for our customers and for Salesforce.

In 2018, we launched Perform in partnership with Korn Ferry, leveraging their deep history, credibility, and employee data across companies, industries and performance models. For more information, check out KF Perform on Salesforce AppExchange.