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Product Design & Systems

Redesigning Talent Planning at Walmart.

Built a 0 -> 1 product that transformed how Walmart evaluates employee potential; replacing fragmented, manual workflows with a structured, system-driven experience.


Part of Walmart's Talent Planning suite within Me@Walmart, supporting succession planning, talent pools, and leadership decision making.

Impact at a glance:

Improved consistency and visibility in talent evaluations across teams.

~52%

adoption among pilot users in first review cycle

~35%

reduction in time to complete talent assessments

~50%+

reduction in reliance on manual tools (PowerPoint, Excel, etc.)

Opportunity


Talent planning at Walmart relied on fragmented tools: Workday, Excel, PowerPoint, and email, resulting in inconsistent processes, lack of visibility, and inefficient collaboration.

Managers and People Partners were required to manually create and share presentations to evaluate talent, often without version control or standardized criteria.


This created friction across:

  • People Partners

  • Managers

  • Leadership (including C-suite review cycles)

Role


UX Designer III
Led 0→1 design for:

  • Assess Potential (primary ownership)

  • Talent Planning Dashboard

  • Succession Planning

Collaborated with a Product Manager, People Partner Product Owner, and one additional UX Designer.

Product System — Talent Planning Suite


Designed a connected system of tools that structured how talent is evaluated, tracked, and acted upon across the organization.


Assess Potential → Entry point
Standardized how employee potential is evaluated


Succession Planning & Talent Pools → Downstream tools
Enabled planning and decision-making using structured data


Dashboard → System visibility
Provided aggregated insights and leadership-level views


This system replaced disconnected workflows with a centralized, scalable product experience.

Product Focus — Assess Potential


Designed the core system used by People Partners, managers, and leadership to evaluate employee potential across teams.

Problem Definition


Talent evaluations were:

  • subjective and inconsistent across teams

  • difficult to compare across organizations

  • disconnected from downstream decisions


There was no structured way to:

  • assess potential at scale

  • standardize evaluation criteria

  • maintain historical context across review cycles

Solution Overview

Created a structured, guided evaluation experience that:

  • standardized how potential is assessed

  • enabled consistent input across roles

  • integrated directly into downstream talent planning workflows

Experience Overview

The experience enables users to:

  • review associates

  • assess potential using defined criteria

  • submit evaluations into a centralized system

  • revisit and compare assessments over time

Key Design Decisions

Structured evaluation framework
Replaced unstructured slide-based, email thread workflows with a standardized evaluation system.

Centralized data model
Shifted from static documents to a persistent system, enabling visibility across teams and workflows.

System integration
Connected evaluation outputs to succession planning, talent pools, and dashboards.

Scalability across roles

Designed for People Partners, managers, and leadership with varying levels of visibility and responsibility.

Onbooarding design
Designed a step-based experience to guide users through complex decision-making while reducing cognitive load.

Onboarding —

Intentional filtering —

Assessing potential —

Bulk actions —

Usability Findings


Preference for single evaluations
Most users preferred assessing one associate at a time, despite availability of bulk actions.


Outcome: Prioritized optimizing single-assessment flows over bulk workflows.

Need for historical context
Users relied on past evaluations to inform decisions but lacked visibility into historical data


Outcome: Informed roadmap prioritization for adding evaluation history and timeline views.

Onboarding and terminology clarity
Users requested guidance on terminology and workflows, especially when yearly review cycles came around


Outcome: Designed embedded onboarding that appears contextually and can be re-triggered on demand.

Considerations


  • Replacing deeply ingrained manual workflows across the organization

  • Supporting multiple roles with different levels of access and responsibility

  • Balancing structured inputs with subjective decision-making

  • Designing for mobile-first usage to enable flexible completion

Contributions


  • Led 0→1 design of Assess Potential

  • Defined evaluation framework and interaction model

  • Designed end-to-end flows, system states, and prototypes

  • Established patterns reused across the Talent Planning suite utilizing Walmart's Living Design System

  • Balanced usability, scalability, and business requirements under tight timelines

Reflection


By designing Assess Potential and all related products as a system and not as stand-alone tools, it enabled consistent, data-informed talent decisions to be made across the organization.