Building the practice behind the platform.

The opportunity

Korn Ferry’s global human capital business spanned professional services and executive recruiting. Its growing digital organization needed an enterprise product design and UX practice that could turn that expertise into customer-centered software and support an expanding product portfolio.

Patrick established the company’s first enterprise product design and UX practice, bringing evidence-based design into an agile development framework. The mandate included building the team, defining how it worked, and helping an enterprise product suite become ready for market.

Building the practice

Patrick recruited, trained, managed, and mentored a team of 20+ UX professionals and designers, including UX designers, product designers, and user researchers. He managed more than a dozen product workstreams and supported the disciplines needed to take products from customer understanding through release.

Working with user researchers and experience leads, he established standards for customer journeys, personas, wireframes, and prototypes. These gave teams a common way to translate research into product decisions and design work.

Customer-led roadmaps and delivery

Mixed-method research informed product roadmaps and prioritized customer needs into meaningful releases. Patrick established a Lean Agile/UX process within a sprint-driven development framework, creating an iterative approach in which customers could directly influence roadmap priorities.

The practice also used marketing automation and inbound and outbound customer methodologies. Product design was connected to how the organization reached, understood, and served its customers throughout the experience.

A design system across the portfolio

Patrick mentored visual designers in creating a scalable product design system for more than a dozen product modules. A unified brand architecture supported both desktop and mobile themes while giving the expanding portfolio a consistent design foundation.

The design system and shared research and prototyping standards supported the growing digital organization as it developed its enterprise suite.

Launching Korn Ferry Digital

The team defined, designed, and launched Korn Ferry Digital. Customer research shaped the suite, while data-driven behavioral analytics supported ongoing refinement after launch. Patrick’s focus was to connect customer requirements, release priorities, and market readiness throughout development.

The outcome

The work expanded Korn Ferry’s global digital footprint and established an enterprise product design practice around the suite. Its technology solutions and services supported customers navigating transformation, leadership development, recruitment and retention, people strategy and performance, and technology implementation.

The original case study describes how the suite helped customers improve business performance across those areas.