I managed the design and evolution of Ashoka’s international site Ashoka.org

Ashoka recognizes and connects social entrepreneurs around the world to accelerate social change. 

The Challenge

Ashoka has more than 30 semi-autonomous offices around the world. Many of these dispersed teams have developed their own visual style and launched their own sites and communications staff are underresourced across the organization.

The Opportunity

• There is a lot of expertise inside the organization. If we were better connected we could learn a lot from each other and build upon the same projects. 
• The small communications staff are passionate, skilled, and open-minded leaders.  
  

The Solution

I organized the product team and created clear product management and design processes 

• I set up and manage weekly agile sprints for my team.
  Impact: All members of the product team understand how their work is contributing to progress on large projects and our epic completion time has been cut in half.  
• I created the team’s fist product roadmap, a snapshot of the epics (projects) my team was working on in a given year.
  Impact: For the first time we gave staff accurate predictions for when their requests would be completed and improved trust in the product team.
• I divided the product team into Design, Content, and Build subteams, each with a dedicated manager.
  Impact: Where there was distrust between team members before I joined, there is now intimate collaboration. Members of each vertical collaborate on key decisionmaking and scoping. 

About Ashoka page before and after redesign

I used redesigns as a way to build bridges between communications and design staff across the world 

• I created and invited designers and communications staff at Ashoka to an inter-team initiative on Ashoka’s brand to create and manage a new style guide. 
  Impact: Staff from our offices in India, Romania, Spain, the Philippines, and more are building upon one another’s design work instead of recreating design resources. I designed and released several page and content type redesigns with positive results: 
  • Returning users increased from 32 to 43.7 percent
  • Users are now 2 percent more likely to remain on the website after the visiting the first page
  • Users spend 3 minutes and 13 seconds (12 percent longer) per session on average, and view 2.96 pages (a 4 percent increase) per session. 
• I started hosting design sessions open to all staff to collaborate on new designs I created for ashoka.org.
  Impact: People from across the organization who I otherwise would never have met are ensuring new designs fit their needs and cultural contexts, making the designs more flexible and effective than ever. 
• I initiated a new design system using Figma.
  Impact: It significantly cut the time I take to deliver designs, get feedback from team members, and hand off to developers. All team members know where to find my most up to date designs. In addition, people outside my team can test prototypes and see up to date designs anytime.