The Future of Employee Experience Design

When Zoom acquired Workvivo in 2023 for a reported $200M+, it was a validation of something that had been building for years: employee experience is now a product design problem, and organisations are willing to pay serious money for the platforms that solve it well.

I worked on the Workvivo platform through a period of significant growth and then through the post-acquisition transition — a period that tested the product design team's ability to maintain a coherent experience vision while managing the realities of integration into a much larger product ecosystem.

What Employee Experience Actually Means

Employee experience design is frequently confused with HR software design. They're related but distinct. HR software — payroll, compliance, performance management — is primarily about processes and records. Employee experience platforms are about how people feel about where they work, how connected they feel to their colleagues and the organisation's mission, and how effectively they can do their jobs.

Workvivo's insight was that the tools organisations were using for employee communications — intranets, email newsletters, town hall meetings — were fundamentally broken for a distributed workforce. The platform was built to bring the engagement model of a social network to the internal communications challenge.

The Design System Challenge Post-Acquisition

One of the most technically demanding aspects of the Workvivo work was the design system rationalisation project — consolidating 240+ components down to a coherent library of 156, without breaking the experiences that thousands of users depended on daily.

This kind of work — sometimes called 'design debt reduction' — is unglamorous but essential. Component proliferation in a mature product is a symptom of a design process that has prioritised feature delivery over coherence. Addressing it requires a clear governance model, close collaboration with engineering, and the discipline to sunset solutions that work but don't belong in the system.

What Comes Next

The Zoom acquisition positioned Workvivo as the employee engagement layer in one of the world's most widely used collaboration platforms. The design challenge that follows is significant: how do you maintain the warmth and community feel of an employee experience platform while integrating it into the functional, utility-focused world of video conferencing and team messaging?

That tension — between engagement and utility, between warm and functional — is one of the defining product design challenges of the enterprise software moment we're in.

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