Aisle Closed

Enter password to continue. Reach out at muxstafali@gmail.com

Return to Home

Product Design & Systems

Designing Succession Planning at Walmart

Expanded and refined a succession planning product (0 -> 1) within Walmart's Talent Planning suite, transforming fragmented, manual workflows into a centralized system for leadership readiness and long-term organizational planning.


Part of Walmart's Talent Planning suite within Me@Walmart, supporting succession planning, talent pools, and organizational continuity.

Impact at a glance:

Improved consistency and visibility in talent evaluations across teams.

~48%

adoption among pilot users during initial rollout

~40%

reduction in time spent preparing succession reviews

~60%+

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

Opportunity


Succession planning at Walmart relied heavily on fragmented workflows across Workday, PowerPoint, Excel, email, and written notes.


Leadership teams conducted succession planning discussions through manually assembled presentations shared across organizations without standardized tracking or version history.


This created challenges around:

  • visibility into leadership readiness

  • tracking succession coverage across roles

  • maintaining historical context

  • coordinating updates across teams and departments

Role


UX Designer III
Inititially partnered alongside another UX Designer leading the core succession planning experience. Midway through the project, ownership transitioned to me, where I led usability testing, iterative refinement, and mobile/desktop improvements.


Responsibilities included:

  • leading usability testing sessions

  • synthesizing research findings into product improvements

  • refining workflows and interaction patterns

  • expanding feature coverage for edge cases and enterprise workflows


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

Product System — Talent Planning Suite


Designed as part of Walmart's broader Talent Planning ecosystem within Me@Campus.


Assess Potential -> Evaluating employee growth potential


Succession Planning -> Leadership readiness & continuity planning

Talent Pools -> Organizational talent grouping


Dashboard -> Cross-system visibility & reporting


This suite centralized talent planning workflows previously scattered across disconnected tools and documents.

Product Focus — Succession Planning


Designed a centralized experience for tracking leadership readiness, succession coverage, and long-term organizational continuity.


The system supported two key planning models:

  • identifying successors for critical roles

  • tracking how many succession slates an individual associate appeared on


This enabled leaders to better understand:

  • organizational risk

  • leadership pipeline depth

  • employee growth trajectory

Problem Definition


Existing succession planning workflows were:

  • difficult to maintain

  • highly manual

  • disconnected across teams and organizations


Preparing for leadership reviews often required:

  • building PowerPoint decks manually

  • consolidating spreadsheets from multiple teams

  • coordinating updates through lengthy email chains


The process created operational overhead while limiting visibility into leadership readiness across the organization.

Solution Overview

Created a centralized succession planning system that:

  • consolidated planning workflows into a single experience

  • structured leadership readiness and succession data

  • enabled easier collaboration and organizational visibility

  • reduced dependency on fragmented documentation workflows


The experience supported:

  • internal successor management

  • readiness tracking

  • succession slate visibility

  • external candidate planning

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

Centralized succession workflows
Replaced fragmented PowerPoint and spreadsheet workflows with a persistent system for managing succession planning

Desktop-prioritized decision-making
While initially approached mobile-first, usability findings revealed users strongly preferred desktop workflows for high-stakes planning activities

Flexible nomination workflows
Designed nomination functionality allowing users to propose associates directly within the system instead of relying on email-based coordination

External candidate support

Expanded the experience to support external, non-Walmart candidates for higher-level leadership planning scenarios

Readiness-focused information architecture
Structured the experience around leadership readiness, succession coverage, and organizational continuity

Add successors (internal & external candidates) —

Add to a succession plan —

Cross-org nominations —

Review nominations —

Usability Findings


Nomination workflows were expected behavior
Users frequently asked whether they could nominate associates directly within the experience rather than relying on manual communication.


Outcome: Designed integrated nomination workflows supporting both internal and external candidates.

External candidate planning was critical
Leadership teams needed the ability to track non-Walmart candidates for director and executive-level succession scenarios.


Outcome: Expanded the data model and workflows to support external talent planning

Considerations


  • Needed to support highly sensitive organizational planning workflows

  • Required flexibility across different leadership structures and departments

  • Balanced structured planning with subjective leadership evaluation

  • Needed to integrate with broader Talent Planning ecosystem

Reflection


This product reinforced the importance of designing operational systems that support long-term organizational decision making and not just immediate task completion.


By centralizing succession planning workflows and improving visibility into leadership readiness, the experience enabled more scalable and informed planning conversations across the organization.