strategic analysis, presentation design, UI/UX

Dropbox - Internal Executive Communications Design

From 2018-2022, I designed most of our All-Hands, Company Strategy roll-outs, Leadership Offsite presentations, and more. In 2022, I started officially leading design for Internal Executive Communications, which encompassed not just presentations, but spearheading initiatives for increasing company-wide scores around comprehension of our strategy comms. Though most of my work has been strictly confidential, I wanted to highlight a few initiatives I’ve worked on over the past few years.

Initiative #1:

Permanent shift to Virtual First work (2021)

Role: design

During the height of the pandemic in 2021, I participated in a Tiger Team to roll out a company-wide shift to Virtual First work. Dropbox was one of the first few tech companies that committed to permanently shifting from in-person collaboration to “Virtual First”, or a mix of remote work with opportunities throughout the year to meet in-person.

Because this roll-out would massively impact employees and their day-to-day, telling the story of why this shift needed to happen as well as what exactly would happen in the next 30, 60, and 90 days was crucial. I partnered with leaders across the company from design to communications to HR to create company-wide presentations and visual aids in a digital playbook that would help clear up confusion and questions surrounding collaboration practices, relocation, and more.

Impact: Virtual First presentation and best practices guide went out to ~2,500+ Dropbox employees across the globe.

Initiative #2:

Improved comprehension of company strategy (2022-23)

Role: Research/Analysis, design

From late 2022 to 2023 I co-led a strategic initiative with a Comms partner to increase company-wide scores around comprehension of the company strategy. We had initially suspected confusion among employees around the company strategy through anecdotal reports, but confirmed this based on data and comments pulled from bi-yearly employee surveys.

This initiative included interviews with employees, data analysis, and a proposal of tactics to address confusion and lack of retention. Our multi-pronged approach aimed at addressing these obstacles at the individual team level, as opposed to relying only on top-down comms approaches in order to better promote discussion and retention of the strategy.

A large part of this approach was also working closely with leadership and Comms to distill complex ideas into clear and compelling slides at the subsequent Strategy Town Hall.

Impact: Scores around comprehension of the company strategy from H1 2022 to H1 2023 rose about an average of 10-20% across the company. Resounding anecdotal reports that employees found the Strategy Town Hall to be much easier to understand and remember.

Initiative #3:

Making company information easier to access (2022-23)

Role: Research/Analysis, ui/ux design

Despite Dropbox’s vision of organizing the world’s files, internally the company still had a long way to go in terms of creating a single source of truth for internal company information. Company strategy, org charts, and other important information were scattered across several different sources, with varying degrees of accuracy and up-to-dateness.

Project Orbit was a multi-phased approach that included an overhaul of our internal intranet, its search system, and the way we organized information in our databases. As part of the first phase, I led a research initiative that included user interviews and a quantitative analysis of employee surveys that informed my redesign of the intranet home page and its search system. Later phases will include a deeper overhaul of our internal wikipedia and other areas of the website.

Impact: Redesign of homepage and search increased employee survey scores around knowing where to find information, and a 30% increase in users utilizing the search function on the intranet.

More Work: