I manage Kellogg's Executive Education website, wherein we deliver over 200 yearly professional management programs for consumers and organizations. The pandemic caused our business to take a significant hit, creating a need for my team to digitize our product offering, creating multiple delivery formats for each.
This pivot to prioritize more inclusive programming gave us the ability to maintain a positive profit margin through the fiscal year 2020 and increased our NPS by 3% to 92 for these newly formatted products.
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Debuting in July 2020, this live virtual programs project — from concept to public launch — took 3 months to implement. Prior to going live, we wireframed our ideas and brought them to our repeat customers for iterative feedback.
V1: A low-fidelity wireframe sample for my senior leaders of our public 'Live Virtual' page — from banner to main CTA — constructed in Figma. This would be the guiding structure for our first MVP.
Sole owner of the website
Our live virtual initiative consumed our entire Executive Education department. As a team member of both marketing and operations, I was the web and LMS (learning management system) manager. Under guidance from the Managing Director of Marketing and Associate Dean, my role was to conceptualize live virtual through my channels. This was an intensely collaborative project that ended in finalzing a new product launch — our live virtual programs.
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User Experience Designer
As our chief designer in Executive Education it was my responsibility to research, ideate and create a stellar experience for our participants while they attend our new product.
+ content manager, strategist
My core responsibility is to manage all content on our CMS (content management system) and work collaboratively with marketing through an entire product cycle rollout for our live virtual programs.
+ web designer, front-end developer
I am not just our product manager, as I also have taken the developer role for Executive Education, too. Our organization, Kellogg, struggled through the pandemic. I am responsible for designing and coding all live virtual assets.
Please note: these roles are not prescribed based on this project, or any others, but for my entire time with Kellogg Executive Education. We are a small group!
The Kellogg Executive Education website is a responsive web 2.0 site built on the CMS, Sitecore 9.2. It currently doesn't repsond to best practices.
The Kellogg Executive Education course sites are a responsive LMS web application — Canvas LMS — existing as a custom integration from Northwestern's.
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Constraints were around every corner:
COVID-19 Pandemic
The pandemic hit education and event management industries hard with revenue plummeting. How do you make money when no one and no company is wanting to train anyone right now? And if you move to digital offerings, how do you keep a prestigious experience and brand alive? We continue to ask these questions while doing consumer research quarterly.
+ antiquity
Working at a department that belongs to a college, belonging to a major university proved immensely challenging. Anyone in an institution knows slow, legacy structures and systems. Under faculty experts in product and agile development, we moved at a brisk pace. Our live virtual programs ended up on-market before our competitors (Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, etc.).
+ communication
Not only was it difficult to move with agility, but taking on a do-or-die project where there are stakeholders across the entire university system, also proved challenging. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Teams grew more disparate and siloed, prolonging our MVP launch. We deployed with user-positive feedback and met our stakeholders where they (mostly) wanted to be.