Turning a Leadership Framework into a Navigation Model

HBR's Leadership Framework existed as a content model long before it became a product. It described the competency areas leaders develop over a career. The challenge was turning that into something a learner could actually navigate on a platform with more than 30,000 resources.

A framework as a philosophy is not usable on its own. It needed to work as information architecture.

From Framework to Taxonomy

I mapped the Framework's leadership competency areas onto a skills taxonomy, so every resource in the catalog could be tagged and surfaced by skill rather than by format or publication date alone. That single decision is what made the rest of the personalization system possible.

• Goal-directed navigation: learners browse by what they want to develop, not by content type
• Consistent tagging: every article, video, podcast, and pathway maps to the same skill vocabulary
• A shared language across the product: the taxonomy that structures navigation is the same one that drives onboarding and pathway suggestions

Closing the Gap Between Idea and Implementation

Turning a framework into a taxonomy is a design decision, but keeping it consistent as the product grows is an operational one. I worked closely with content, engineering, and stakeholders to build an enterprise-level design system that kept the taxonomy, navigation, and UI patterns in sync as new features shipped. That system is what let the team experiment faster without every new pathway or feature drifting from the model.

A framework only works as a product feature if it's structural. Reference it on a landing page and it's decoration. Bake it into navigation and tagging, and it becomes the thing that makes personalization possible.