Tim McKenna

The Predictive Index

Predictive Index — Boston, MA

Building the platform that helps organizations uncover better workplace relationships and outcomes.

Role: Director of Product Design
Mandate: Develop the vision and execution for a unified platform so PI’s four products are enmeshed seamlessly together under one scalable architecture and cohesive product experience.
Team: 11
– 4 Product-specific designers
– 4 Platform-specific designers
– 1 Visual Designer
– 1 UI Engineer
– 1 UX Researcher

Snapshot

  • Helped define and lead the platform UX vision to connect four products under a unified React-based architecture, enabling consistent permissions, roles, upgrade paths, and a smoother customer journey across the talent lifecycle.
  • Improved basic-to-paid conversion, contributing to approximately $2.2M in revenue growth in Q4 2022 through better upgrade flows and platform-level experience.
  • Shipped core platform enhancements—Global Header, Global Navigation, Global Search, Global Administration, and a new RBAC permissions schema—that increased adoption from initial behavioral assessment into hiring, team assessments, and internal development.
  • Introduced and implemented the Google HEART framework with Product Management, integrating qualitative and quantitative UX metrics, increasing task success for key workflows, reducing churn by 18%, and improving overall happiness (median CSAT of 83%).

Company & Product Context

The Predictive Index is often described as the “world’s oldest startup”—a 60-year-old business built around its Behavioral Assessment (BA), helping organizations understand work styles and build better teams. PI’s modern SaaS products—Hire, Inspire, Design, and Diagnose—were powerful but historically developed as separate modules.


When I joined, these offerings were connected yet siloed, living in what we called a “little p platform.” Customers felt friction as they moved from assessment to hiring to team design and development. To support PI’s growth goals, we needed to evolve into a true “big P platform” experience that treated these modules as one integrated system.

A view of identified risks in affinity grouping that was created in our design sprints around our Inspire product.
I facilitated a week-long design sprint with ten individuals to identify what we should focus on in developing the first version of Inspire 2.0. Several risks were identified, with a sizable portion related to platform readiness and architecture.

Mandate & Leadership Scope

Formal role
As Director of Product Design, I was accountable for the platform design initiative to unify PI’s four products into a single, scalable experience and architecture that could support modern growth, cross-sell, and lifecycle adoption.

What I really did

View of our design principles. We focused on clear, discoverable, scalable, and data-informed principles to approach our work.
We developed our design principles as a team activity. These principles would guide how we would work and develop solutions.
  • Took the lead on the platform-level UX vision and partnered with engineering and product to create a roadmap that integrated the four products into a coherent, React-based platform.
  • Led the rollout of the HEART framework across product and UX, establishing shared definitions and metrics for happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success.
  • Redesigned the product development process so design had equal footing with product and engineering—identifying research needs, integrating insights into roadmaps, and shaping what shipped.
  • Built cross-team systems and processes that allowed six distinct teams to collaborate, identify cross-dependencies, and build on shared logic to avoid UX debt.
  • Formalized a content design practice, pairing content designers with product designers at a 1:1 ratio with PMs and engineering leads to improve product clarity and reduce friction in key workflows.
  • Introduced cross-functional design sprints for rapid ideation and growth experimentation, involving stakeholders from multiple departments early in the process.
  • Created professional development plans with each designer to support their growth and ensure their skill development increased both their personal career trajectory and the value they brought to PI.
A view of our Tapestry design system component readiness screen in Zeroheight.
The entire design team contributed to building our design system, Tapestry. This component status table displays what components were ready to use in both Figma and integrated into our UI library, what was in progress to be built, what still needed team review, and what was left to do.

Work Pillars

1. Unifying the Platform

Context
PI’s core products—Hire, Inspire, Design, Diagnose—served different stages of the employee lifecycle, but the experience felt fragmented. Permissions behaved differently across modules, navigation patterns shifted, and upgrade paths were inconsistent, creating confusion for customers and operational drag for internal teams.

What I led

  • Worked with product and engineering leaders to define an end‑to‑end platform vision that treated the four products as one unified experience, anchored by the Behavioral Assessment and a shared React-based architecture.
  • Facilitated workshops to distinguish platform-level capabilities (e.g., user management, permissions, sharing, navigation, search) from module-specific features, so teams knew what should be global vs. local.
  • Partnered with engineering and product leadership to sequence and prioritize platform work alongside feature delivery, avoiding “platform as a side project.”

Impact

  • Enabled a cohesive experience across the talent lifecycle, where customers could move from assessment to hiring to team design and development without feeling like they were in four different products.
  • Created a foundation that supported scalable permissions, roles, and upgrade paths, making it easier to add new capabilities without fragmenting UX.
View of our Global Navigation from our design system.
Our global navigation in our 2.0 products scales with the customer’s subscription and access to a suite of growth products.

2. Platform Enhancements that Drove Adoption & Revenue

Context
Fragmented platform patterns (e.g., inconsistent sharing, disconnected navigation) made it hard for users to discover and adopt additional products beyond the initial assessment. This limited cross-sell and overall value realization.

What I led

  • Designed and delivered core platform features, including:
    • A global header that standardized branding and key actions across modules.
    • Our new global navigation that scaled based on a customer’s subscription and clearly surfaced available and upsell modules.
    • New global search to help users find people, teams, and assets across the platform.
    • A unified global administration for centralized user management, invitations, and third-party access.
    • A new RBAC permissioning schema that rationalized roles and access across modules.
  • Collaborated with product and growth teams to design upgrade flows and in-product paths that moved users from basic/assessment usage into Hire, Inspire, Design, and Diagnose.

Impact

  • Platform enhancements increased adoption of products beyond the initial assessment, making it more natural for customers to expand into hiring, team assessments, and internal development.
  • Improved upgrade paths and platform clarity contributed to roughly $2.2M in revenue growth in Q4 2022 from basic‑to‑paid conversions and expansion.

Not every enhancement had the impact we expected; a few early patterns added noise rather than clarity, and we had to simplify and roll them back, which helped refine our criteria for what belonged at the platform level.

View of the Global Admin and the Global Navigation in the Organization Users screen.
Here, you will see the global navigation bar in every product that reflects what product module your company has subscribed to. This view is of the Global Admin, where an administrator can view all organization users, outstanding invitations, and any third-party users invited into your organization.

3. Measuring Experience with HEART

Context
Before the HEART framework, teams measured success inconsistently—some focused on NPS, others on usage proxies, and many lacked clear links between UX changes and business outcomes.

What I led

  • Introduced the Google HEART framework at PI in partnership with Product Management, and worked with teams to make it practical rather than purely theoretical.
  • Defined shared UX metrics for key workflows and products, and connected them to business goals like churn reduction, expansion, and conversion.
  • Baked HEART into the product development process: discovery, experimentation, launch, and iteration all referenced HEART metrics.

Impact

  • Increased task success for key workflows by focusing design and engineering around measurable UX improvements.
  • Contributed to an 18% reduction in churn, as UX improvements addressed friction points that were driving customers away.
  • Shifted focus from generic NPS to more actionable CSAT and task-level metrics, achieving a median CSAT of 83% for targeted experiences.

We found that HEART worked best when we kept it focused—one or two key signals per workflow—so teams could act on the data instead of getting lost in it.

3. Product Development, Content Design, and Cross‑Team Collaboration

Context
PI had strong talent and product opportunities, but teams operated in silos, and design wasn’t always brought in early enough to shape strategy. Processes varied team to team, causing misalignment and UX debt.

What I led

  • Redesigned the product development process, explicitly giving design an equal voice with product and engineering in shaping roadmaps, identifying research needs, and acting on insights.
  • Established a balanced team structure: 1 Product Manager, 1 Content Designer, 1 Engineering Lead, 1 Product Designer per team, ensuring content and UX were not afterthoughts.
  • Evolved an informal content contribution model into a dedicated content design practice, pairing content designers with product designers to clarify complex concepts, flows, and microcopy across the platform.
  • Created and socialized process diagrams showing when and how leaders from other business units should be involved in product labs and discovery.
  • Launched cross-functional design sprints that brought together stakeholders from multiple departments to rapidly explore ideas and de-risk concepts early.

Impact

  • Reduced friction to task success by pairing content and product design closely, making flows clearer and decisions easier.
  • Improved alignment across six teams, reducing duplicated work and UX debt.
  • Increased buy-in and early alignment from leaders across business units, improving roadmap clarity and execution quality.
A view of a product development process that would incorporate early contribution and collaboration with all business unit leaders.
One of the areas we struggled with in product development was getting leaders in other business unit brought in to contribute and collaborate on product lab activities early enough to ensure alignment. My colleague and I developed this approach that define how we would operate and ensure earlier participation from integral stakeholders. We presented this approach at our Directors Cohort meeting and was met with positive feedback on this approach.

Metrics & Outcomes Snapshot

  • Unified four core products (Hire, Inspire, Design, Diagnose) under a single platform vision and React-based architecture.
  • Delivered platform features (Global Header, Navigation, Search, Admin, RBAC) that improved lifecycle adoption that contributed to Q4 2022 revenue from basic‑to‑paid conversion and expansion.
  • Implemented HEART metrics, leading to:
    • Increased task success on key workflows.
    • 18% reduction in churn.
    • Median CSAT of 83% on targeted experiences.
  • Built a balanced product trio + content model (PM, Product Designer, Content Designer, Engineering Lead) that improved product maturity and reduced UX friction.
  • Established cross-team processes and sprints that aligned six distinct teams and minimized UX debt.

How The Predictive Index Shaped My Leadership

The Predictive Index sharpened my ability to think and act at a platform level—unifying multiple products, teams, and metrics into a coherent system that drives business outcomes. It reinforced my belief that design must be measured, not just admired, and that frameworks like HEART can anchor conversations between UX and the business.


It also deepened my practice of building cross-functional, balanced teams and processes where design, content, product, and engineering are true partners. That experience directly informs how I now approach VP-level roles: I focus on unifying fragmented experiences, making impact measurable, and putting the right structures in place so multiple teams can build on a shared platform instead of reinventing it in silos.