OVERVIEW

During the rapid global shift to remote work in June 2020, I stepped in as Senior Product Design Manager to co-found the Virtual Events Product & Service Experience Team at McKinsey & Company. Faced with the immediate challenge of migrating hundreds of high-profile, high-stakes, face-to-face partner and client events to digital environments, I led the end-to-end service design, user research, and cross-functional strategy to modernize the Firm’s event tech stack. Over two years, my product team audited legacy tools, launched an enterprise digital events portal, and established a completely new global service and support model as social norms evolved with the pandemic. This operational engine - with support from stakeholders and specialists spanning product engineering, change management, and event production - successfully stabilized the firm's immediate collaboration needs, retired costly legacy software, and ultimately shifted the organization toward a sustainable hybrid delivery model as in-person engagements resumed.

While driving this transformation, I recognized an opportunity to transition the team from a reactive posture to a proactive, long-term strategy. Partnering with another design lead within the firm's enterprise innovation incubator, we designed and piloted a structured Strategic Foresight Framework using the Virtual Events team as our initial testbed. To accommodate the realities of an active, agile product team, we architected a flexible model of concise, highly collaborative innovation sprints and workshops conducted over four weeks. This dual approach yielded significant results: the Virtual Events team established a predictive roadmap and published a defining foresight framework utilized by expert consultants firm-wide, while the methodology itself successfully scaled into a formalized, McKinsey-wide Innovation Accelerator practice that permanently elevated organizational fluency in strategic futures for client services teams.

GOALS

1. Modernize and standardize the event stack replace fragmented, costly legacy infrastructure targeting $1M cost savings for year 1

2. Design an end-to-end service model that simplifies event production, empowers self-service, and elevates the event experience for thousands of global participants.

3. Democratize strategic foresight methods so that client service teams can systematically forecast market shifts without disrupting active development cycle.

4. Transition the broader organization into a strategic, proactive innovation culture with operational cadences and performance metrics.