Alignment | Summer Internship
Designing in a fast-paced B2B startup environment
OVERVIEW
Timeframe
Jun - Sep 2024 (3 months)
My Role
Product Design Intern
Tools
Figma
Webflow
BACKGROUND
Designing in the fast-paced startup world
During this past summer, I had the pleasure of working at Alignment as a Product Design Intern. Alignment is a strategic collaboration platform that helps stay aligned by streamlining goal-setting, performance tracking, and decision-making, I worked on enhancing the usability and functionality of key enterprise tools. The three main projects I worked on were...
PART 1
OVERVIEW
Designing a streamlined, intuitive dashboard to empower teams and leadership
This project focused on designing a quarterly team performance dashboard to improve clarity, usability, and actionable insights. I collaborated closely with the CEO to shape the design vision, partnered with two key customers to define the problem and iterate on solutions, and worked alongside the engineering team to bring the final product to life.
PROBLEM
The Alignment Playbook wasn't reaching it’s full potential for users.
After being onboarded, one of my first tasks was to conduct a UX audit of the platform. A primary issue that I found was within the connection within the 5-step Alignment Playbook--the core quarterly system that Alignment uses to help teams set goals, track progress, and reflect on their performance.
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Mission
2
SWOT
3
OKR
The 5-step quarterly Alignment Playbook!
Which each step was valuable on its own, I discovered that the steps operated more like individual frameworks rather than a cohesive, easy-to-follow flow that teams can utilize successfully to make the most out of their quarter.
The Alignment Playbook had an unorganized flow.
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2
5
4
3
The 5 individual frameworks of the Playbook
After conducting my UX audit, I presented my key findings to the team, emphasizing that the lack of cohesion between the steps in the Alignment Playbook was a major usability challenge. This disconnect seemed to make it difficult for teams to seamlessly transition between steps, potentially reducing engagement and limiting the system’s full potential.
FLUSHING OUT THE PROBLEM
Expanding the problem scope via meeting with 2 close customers
To validate my claim, we set up calls with two close customers, aiming to understand how they navigated the Alignment Playbook throughout their quarter and held their teams accountable. During these interviews, they described struggling with fragmented workflows, making it difficult to track progress across different steps.
Surprisingly, we discovered that the issue wasn’t just affecting individual team members—it was also a major pain point for HR and leadership teams. Without a unified view, they found it challenging to assess team alignment, identify bottlenecks, and drive meaningful improvements.
OBJECTIVE STATEMENT
How might we create a more cohesive & intuitive experience that connects the 5-Step Alignment Playbook, ensuring that teams can easily track their progress, understand the relationship between different steps, and provide leadership with a clear, actionable view of team alignment?
DETERMINING OUR DIRECTION
Two approaches: deciding to create an external, high-level view of the Alignment Playbook
After validating and properly defining the problem, I questioned how I should begin to approach it. I came up with two possible design directions:
Improving Navigation Between Steps
Potential idea: Persistent Navigation Component added to each step’s framework page
vs.
Creating an External, High-level View
Potential idea: An external Dashboard/Workspace-level Interface
While the first option would improve navigation at the framework level—a location users are already familiar with—it didn’t address the core issue of creating an overall cohesive experience or providing leadership with a strategic, high-level view.
Evaluating the tradeoffs, I determined that the second option would meet user and business needs by streamlining the entire Alignment Playbook in one place while also empowering leadership to monitor team performance and make data-driven decisions.
IDEATION
Converting Team Member, HR, and Leadership needs into a dashboard
To begin brainstorming our key features, it was important to understand our different types of stakeholders:
Team Members
track personal & team progress
understand priorities & focus areas
identify blockers & improvement areas
HR & Leadership
monitor overall team performance
identify struggling teams & offer support
align teams with company-wide goals
Understanding the needs of our product feature, we set out to create a Workspace-level Dashboard with the following key features:
Clearly linking individual projects together as part of the Quarterly Playbook
Team Members
HR & Leadership
Visually highlighting adoption & engagement insights
HR & Leadership
Displaying all teams data on a singular page
HR & Leadership
VERSION 1
Beginning to visualize the Playbook
The 1st version of the dashboard
Each team had their own row in the dashboard, with their columns being...
Objectives:
Showing their overall completion of their goals
Alignment Playbook:
Connecting the different projects (the bubbles) in their quarterly Playbook!
Besides the Top 6 bubble which displayed a percentage, each bubble’s number represented the score that the teams would personally assign to each of their projects
Activity:
Showing the total amount of project items in all steps of the Alignment Playbook
During our initial calls with both customers, we had established that we would work hand-in-hand with them throughout the development of our dashboard feature. When we presented our first mockup, we discovered some issues:
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Self-reported ratings were not a useful metric for projects
After completing a project (ex: SWOT Analysis), teams would be able to rate the individual parts of their project, giving them a high-level score (ex: 8.2). Originally, we used this score as the data populating the dashboard. However, this wasn’t reliable nor was it providing our users with useful and consistent data. Some teams rated themselves optimistically, while others were overly critical.
Iteration: Displaying success via project item count!
We switched from subjective ratings to project item counts, ensuring ratings were clear and data-backed measurements of engagement & adoption. A higher item count indicated a more comprehensive project--reflecting deeper alignment and team investment.
2
Dashboard organization didn’t allow for quick team comparison
We discovered that HR & Leadership struggled with comparing performance across groups. While the bubbles nicely connected individual team’s Playbook rhythm, they failed to provide a quick way to evaluate multiple teams at once to analyze workspace-wide performance.
Iteration: Heatmaps for better comparison!
Instead of isolated groups of bubbles, we introduced a heatmap format, making it easier to:
Spot trends across teams at a glance
Identify struggling teams without manual comparisons
VERSION 2
Empowering easy workspace-wide analysis through a heatmap
The 2nd version of the dashboard
Apart from our main iterations, we also added
A simple navigation compass at the top to select the workspace, team, and quarter
The Mission Statement to drive home the team’s objective and contextualize their progress
Column labels to distinguish what the numbers in each different column indicate
After iterating, we hopped on another round of calls to gather more feedback.
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The colors were discouraging
Users, especially team members, felt discouraged when seeing red on the dashboard, interpreting it as failure rather than an area for improvement. Leadership also noted that the red/yellow/green system created unnecessary anxiety instead of fostering alignment. Our color choices were impacting team morale and engagement.
33%
66%
33%
66%
Iteration: A softer, more constructive color system!
We replaced the red/yellow/green into a greyscale-to-purple gradient, maintaining the value of the heatmap while reducing negative psychological impact (and fitting in with our brand colors)
The deeper the purple, the greater the succes!
Both sets of customers loved the idea! After implementing the color changes, as well as streamlining some data visualization elements, we presented our final dashboard design.
FINAL DESIGN
An intuitive dashboard for seamless team insights
The final version of the dashboard
The final dashboard provides a comprehensive view of team performance and alignment across multiple teams in a workspace. Each team has their own row, with key sections displaying critical project data for teams and leadership to view.
It organizes project engagement, goal progress, and historical trends into a single space, making it easier to track alignment and effectiveness over time.
A heatmap-inspired greyscale-to-purple gradient helps surface insights without the negative bias of traditional red/yellow/green indicators. Users can dynamically filter by workspace, team, and quarter, ensuring flexibility in comparison and analysis.
LESSONS LEARNED
Designing with users, not just for them
Working on the dashboard this summer was the most fulfilling part of my role. I led this project from initial research to final implementation, collaborating closely with both the Alignment team and two key customers.
This experience reinforced that the best solutions come from treating users as co-designers rather than just participants. Iterating directly with our customers throughout the process shaped a system that truly worked for them.
Moving forward, I’ll carry this mindset into future projects—prioritizing collaboration, continuous iteration, and designing with users to create impactful, user-driven solutions.
PART 2: SEARCH BAR & SEARCH RESULTS PAGE
PART 3: MOBILE APP VERSION
coming soon...
