Chris Willis

This scenario highlights my ability to manage competing priorities and adapt to changing circumstances by proposing a phased approach incorporating customer needs and insights from a smaller project into a larger project plan.

My design team was working against a project plan spanning 12 months, but the customer urgently needed UX research and design for a smaller integrated system. The team pushed back, but as a product manager, I recognized the importance of meeting the customer's needs and delivering value as quickly as possible. At the same time, we needed to stay on track with the larger enterprise initiative.

To address this challenge, I developed a new phased roadmap. The initial discovery phase was completed as planned. Then, we shifted our focus to a 9-week end-to-end pilot project to meet the integration needs and gain insights we could apply to the larger project.

After completing the pilot, we resumed the enterprise system project at the design phase, incorporating our learnings. This approach allowed us to meet the customer's needs while staying on track with the larger enterprise project plan and ultimately improving overall outcomes for our team and the customer.

HP was launching a global services initiative and onboarding a large cohort of new sales consultants. Statistically, it took four months for a new sales consultant to meet the quota, with a high turnover of those who do not meet 30, 60, or 90-day goals. Enlisting high-performing salespeople as coaches was a proven way to boost and manage performance, but the cost of taking top performers out of the field was prohibitive.

Based on my prior work, I hypothesized a technology-enabled onboarding program could automate the reach of high-performing sales coaches and managers, speed productivity, and improve new hire outcomes.

My team developed a gamified sales onboarding portal with prescriptive coaching videos and live touchpoints at 30, 60, and 90 days. Pilot participants were given a suggested cadence for learning but were allowed to complete the program at their own pace.

Portal participation became a leading indicator of future success. On average, sellers who completed the 90-day program in 60 days or less yielded 124% of the quota, and sellers who completed it in 30 days or less yielded 148%. We repeated and iterated on this model across multiple divisions of HP for onboarding sales professionals and high-potential leaders.

Lectora is one of the world's top three e-learning authoring tools. As a legacy enterprise tool, it's also one of the most complex. When ELB Learning acquired Lectora, they tasked me with improving its user-friendliness without overhauling its core functionality.

I began by interviewing enterprise customers and examining customer support cases to accomplish this. I also identified common instructional design patterns for developing corporate learning.

To simplify learning development, we created pre-built, customizable course frameworks that eliminated the need for the intimidating and time-consuming front-end setup. We added customizable media assets and interaction templates to make it even easier to use.

Previously, new users needed a one-hour training session with customer support or sales to get started with Lectora. But with the new modular, templatized system, users could self-serve and create their first course without assistance in less than half the time.