In 2023, 10KC's 5x-ed user growth led to a soaring demand for structured and scalable mentorship
From 2021–2023, the HR industry has witnessed significant events such as The Great Resignation, and mass layoffs. More and more, enterprises look for HR tech solutions to retain and attract talent to their organizations and drive employee engagement.
10KC is a SaaS platform that empowers HR managers to build and deploy mentorship programs to thousands of employees to get mentorship, training, and ultimately achieve career goals.
I designed features to refine the platform UX for admin users, implementing features tailored to their needs, and navigating growth and scale challenges as our user base 5x-ed over 2023.
Directors of Talents, CHROs, and HR managers use 10KC to design, and build, and deploy their programs. They use 10KC to scale their employees development initiatives, through the following goals:
Launch high-quality programs with minimal setup time to automate tasks, and reduce manual labour
Support as many employees as possible to drive employee engagement and retention
Streamline program onboarding by empowering clients with self-serve configurations
Our clients heavily depended on Customer Success to create and launch mentorship programs because there was no centralized launch process.
Without a streamlined launch process and fragmented documentation in Notion and Google Drive, admins experienced a high-friction and extremely manual launch experience (~1 month to launch each program).
As 10KC moves towards self-serve, I saw an opportunity to streamline program onboarding, and reduce friction when launching programs.
I designed our new program launch experience, with knowledge distilled from our Customer Success' best practices and launch process.
The guide is embedded in the program, and immediately accessible to all admin users. They can follow the steps to prepare their program's curriculum, and then launch to the end-users once all configurations are ready.
Increase adoption rate by improving our pairing algorithm
Historically, 10KC's mentorship programs had low end-user adoption. On average, only 40% of invited employees could participate in the program. Most mentees were left out because there weren't enough mentors to support them.
This was a crucial problem to solve. Improving matching capability would lead to more career opportunities and experiences being accessible to employees — 10KC’s core mission.
Across all our customers, admin users were pairing multiple mentees with 1 mentor to increase the number of admitted mentees. But the workaround is clunky, and affects our reporting data.
I worked with engineers to identify the participant data needed for our pairing algorithm enhancement, and designed the UI to gather and adjust the following data.
The goal was to create more pairings with higher compatibility with the additional data dimensions:
This data enables pairings to be created based on employee segments such as
business department, senior level, etc.
This enables participants to customize how they want to participate in the program, and their meeting capacity.
I designed and shipped Mentoring group: the ability to pair 1 Mentor with multiple Mentees. Admin users can now pair support exponentially more mentees by pairing them with the same mentors.
I also designed the new program onboarding flow for end-users to gather data for the algorithm. This included the ability to choose their program role, pairing capacity, and preferred people to meet with.
Doubled our program adoption rate through enhanced matchmaking capability
Doubled our match rate to 80% with the new enhancement, over 40K pairings were created! Onboarded 120 clients onto the new feature and delivered mentorship experiences to over 100K users.
Time-to-launch decreased by 70% (50hrs -> 10hrs)
Overall, we reduced time-to-launch programs by 70% and increased number of launch programs by 200%. This contributed to our 120% YoY growth in 2023 (11M$ ARR).
