HBR Spark

Organizations needed a scalable, personalized leadership development platform that fit into the daily workflows of busy emerging and established leaders. Traditional learning formats failed to engage because they didn't map to individual goals or integrate smoothly into work, leaving a gap between ambitious L&D programs and actual learner adoption. That platform also needed an administrative layer organizations could actually run. Harvard Business Impact serves organizations across industries, and the admins managing it needed complete, coherent tools for user groups, content assignment, and pathway creation, not a set of screens that worked independently but felt disconnected from each other.

HBR Spark needed to work as one coherent system from two different vantage points: the learner navigating it, and the admin configuring it underneath. I designed the information architecture around HBR's Leadership Framework, transforming it into both a navigation model and a skills taxonomy that made content discovery intuitive and goal-directed. I collaborated closely with content, engineering, and stakeholders to build an enterprise-level design system that closed the gap between ideation and implementation, enabling faster and more consistent experimentation across the platform. The personalization journey starts at onboarding: a guided flow that asks learners about their role and development priorities, surfacing relevant content from the first session rather than asking them to navigate a catalog of over 30,000 resources on their own. From there, the platform assesses where a learner is in their leadership journey, suggests skills to focus on, and guides them through structured pathways, with a Leader Profile visualization showing progress against the Framework at any point. Underneath sits a complete admin system across four areas: Catalog, Groups, Assignments, and Pathway Editor. Groups covers the full journey from an empty organization state through creation, member search, bulk CSV import, and inline editing. Assignments covers list and detail views, multi-assignee management, and cancellation, built on a notification decision tree mapped before any screen was designed, so the logic for who gets notified and when was settled before the UI had to accommodate it. The Pathway Editor is the admin-side authoring tool for the same pathways learners move through, with a full draft-to-publish lifecycle.

HBR Spark delivers a highly personalized learning experience that puts learners in control of their development journey, combining articles, videos, podcasts, and curated pathways with skill-based personalization, on top of an admin system where every screen state is accounted for and every interaction pattern stays consistent across feature areas. The result is one platform that holds together end to end, for the people using it and the people running it.