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How designing a visionary feature that never made it to production can bring business results?

How has out-of-the-box thinking helped us to dominate the market, exceed client's expectations, and bash competition by realizing their true needs, and building a winning mentoring platform?

TLDR

  • A new mentoring solution was needed to level up with competition.

  • Suggested solutions included structured programs for enhanced mentoring opportunities.

  • With >150,000 mentors and >20,000 completed mentorships, this approach has empowered mentors and supporters to give back effectively, while increasing engagement and commitment to the organization.

A new mentoring solution was needed to level up with competition.

Suggested solutions included structured programs for enhanced mentoring opportunities.

With >150,000 mentors and >20,000 completed mentorships, this approach has empowered mentors and supporters to give back effectively, while increasing engagement and commitment to the organization.


  • A new mentoring solution was needed to level up with competition.

  • Suggested solutions included structured programs for enhanced mentoring opportunities.

  • With >150,000 mentors and >20,000 completed mentorships, this approach has empowered mentors and supporters to give back effectively, while increasing engagement and commitment to the organization.

Business Wins

  • Established a reputation for the leading provider for mentoring solutions in the market

  • 26% increase in general closed-won deals

  • 86% increase in closed-won deals for clients seeking mentoring solutions

  • Introduced new GTM tactics

UX Winning Results

  • 15% adoption rate - Smaller businesses expected to have a higher rate than large institutions

  • <10 tickets to support upon adoption - regarding usability issues

  • 8%-10% Active relationships - relationships which are active and checked at least one milestone

  • Overwhelmingly positive feedback from clients

The Story

  • Graduway is the global leading provider of an engagement platform for organization’s communities, mainly for higher education.

  • The message from Sales was that competitors are slicing the company's revenue by having a mentoring solution.

  • To prevent radical churn we realized mentoring was a burning matter, so PM’s and Design initiated discovery sessions around the topic

Defining the Business Goal

Build an intuitive and easy-to-use mentoring solution that an organization can run for its' constituents, that fosters networking and connections between users while strengthening the relationship and engagement with the organization.

User Types

There are 3 types of users for this specific project:

  1. Client user: Career + engagement Manager
    Facilitates and manages the Admin side.
    Main goal: Yoy increase in quality mentoring relationships

  2. End user: Mentor
    Main goal: Mentor with ease and in minimal effort

  3. End user: Mentee
    Main goal: Set foot in the industry with the help and connection of a mentor

There are 3 types of users for this specific project:

  1. Client user: Career + engagement Manager
    Facilitates and manages the Admin side.
    Main goal: Yoy increase in quality mentoring relationships

  2. End user: Mentor
    Main goal: Mentor with ease and in minimal effort

  3. End user: Mentee
    Main goal: Set foot in the industry with the help and connection of a mentor

My Role

  • Design lead and hands-on

  • Directed 1 Product Designers

  • Collaborated with Product Managers/ Engineers/ Product-Marketing/ Marketing/ Customer Success/ Support

  • Set process, flow and architecture hierarchy 

  • Directed and played a hands-on part on UI and visuals

  • Conducted client interviews figuring true needs and opportunities

Discovery Findings & Insights:

We made few discovery calls with clients to understand how they currently use mentorship and figuring out their needs. We found that:

  1. Managers are currently using Sheets and Excel for matching mentors to mentees

  2. They would love to automate this process for bulk matches, but appreciate the control they have for individual matching

  3. Mentoring sessions have seasons (spring, autumn etc.)

  4. They separate mentoring sheets by subjects (Sports, Finance, Career Etc.)

  5. They lose track of mentoring relationships and can’t tell when it’s “real”

  6. There’s a need for their specific CRM integration

How Might We Design sessions:

We then ran a rapid Design Thinking sprint session with Product, Customer Success, and Design, facilitated by me, to clarify the customer's needs and ideate profound solutions.

The session was divided to 4 sections:

  1. Client's quotes

  2. Customer + Client needs

  3. "How Might We" questions

  4. Ideation

Key Insights

  1. Quotes:
    We covered some key quotes from direct calls with clients after taking focus groups and personal conversations

  2. Needs:

    • CRM integration

    • Control in matching criteria

    • Control in individual matching

    • Automate bulk matching

    • Automate suggestions for mentoring matches

    • Separate mentorships by subjects (or groups)

    • Set timing for mentorship groups

    • Track mentoring relationships

    • Qual + Quant data

  3. HMW questions:

    • Help admins to keep mentorships in order by timing and subject?

    • Relate each mentoring group to a specific user list?

    • Help admins to have control when creating matches, while

    • Saving time by using smart-matching (automate the bulk matches)?

    • Track relationships for quality results?

    • Use quant + qual data in a relationship?

  4. Solutions:

    • Mentoring “Groups” or “Programs”

    • In each program Admins are able to:

      • Set name, 

      • Set timing and

      • Set automatic-matching-criteria

      • Upload a specific user list (both mentors and mentees)

      • Match mentoring relationships 

      • Set milestones for each relationship

      • Create a survey for mentors and mentees for qualitative data

      • Grab insights for each program with program analytics and data

It took 3 iterations between Design, Product, clients and Business to come up with a comprehensive solution that got an overwhelmingly positive feedback from clients and got us to push towards hi-fi wireframes

The Solution

Say hello to Mentoring Programs - a place where system admins can set, customize, manage, and analyze mentorships in batches

The Client Flow
  1. How admins launch a mentoring program?

Admins set essential details such as the start and end dates, set limits on the number of mentors and mentees.
To get the real matching results they calibrate the matching algorithm by assigning weights to various factors (e.g., industry, job function, field of study, location) on a scale of 1 to 10.

Once created, programs appear as a list with items showing metadata and the ability to edit or delete a program in the ellipsis menu

  1. Adding users to a program

After setting up a program, an empty-state page with a tab menu bar appears. The order of the pages suggests the chronological flow to take actions: Users > Matches > Milestones > Surveys > Analytics

Client feedback has emphasized the importance of providing multiple options and robust controls, enabling administrators to have complete oversight and control over participants in the mentoring program.

Uploading users covers all options availablle, including:

  • All users from CRM and directory

  • Specific users

  • Option to choose from customized filters

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