karat

Karat Service Blueprint

Karat provides ‘technical hiring as-a-service’ to companies. My team wanted to create a customer journey to get a thorough understanding and the context of how our product is consumed. Preliminary research showed that almost 70% the client interaction was happening outside of the product (UI). Karat was more of a white glove service than a self-serve product. We quickly realized that a service blueprint would be the best way to visualize the Karat story esp since it involved multiple touch points & required cross functional effort to serve a customer.

I started off by expanding an internal training document (that showed the different steps in the customer journey & the Karat teams involved in each step into) by adding more layers of information that I uncovered from conversations with account management, customer success, sales, solutions engineering & product teams. After having collected and documented this anecdotal data, I shared the the first version of the artifact as a miro board with more members of these teams and encouraged them to add to it as well as to validate the information. This was the first time these teams were seeing the full picture and getting a taste of the inefficiencies in the current delivery model. We made sure to include metrics like estimated calendar time and internal manual hours for each step to quantize these inefficiencies & the cost to company. While I was driving the conversation with folks on the field , my director was actively building rapport and socializing the artifact with the leaders of these teams. Sticking to our design principle of breaking silos, we made sure that these teams were actively participating in authoring and interacting with the service blueprint.

The artifact was very well received by product leadership and other teams. Product leveraged the artifact to identify opportunities and to inform strategy. The customer success team started using the service blueprint to onboard new hires and get them to speed on all the moving pieces.

Our goal was to create a visual artifact that clearly conveys the gaps and challenges in the current delivery model and pitch for a self serve experience that can support product led growth.

We also created a document that explained our methodology of collecting and synthesizing the data and a proposal for further research to clearly understand the technical hiring process, key personas involved and their JBTD.

Reimagining the candidate experience

Leveraging storytelling to visualize and communicate the vision

Karat is a screening service. Most candidates don't advance to the next stage in the Karat interview process, and this can leave a negative impression of the Karat brand with candidates. I was tasked to explore how we could provide value to candidates beyond the interview and possibly turn an inflection point into an opportunity for positive brand engagement and business growth

Stories are super useful in communicating abstract concepts without drowning in the details. I worked with the design director to create a story around Jordan, a junior engineer and her struggles when looking for new opportunities. The artifact was intended to be a conversation starter.

The narrative starts with how Karat matches Jordan with multiple companies based on her performance in just one Karat assessment. The focus then shifts to Jane, a recruiter at Zapier. She receives a notification that Jordan has entered her candidate pipeline. Jane is now spending less time sourcing and discovering talent as Karat sends vetted candidates to her pipeline. Other characters like Seth the Hiring Manager & Maya, Head of recruiting also had brief appearances. We were able to garner engagement from stakeholders initially but the interest fizzled out as the hiring market changed dramatically during that time

A fully tokenized design system

Designing and building Daikon - Karat’s new Design Language

I worked with other designers in my team to create a fully tokenized multi brand design system. We researched and tried out various token naming frameworks used by the teams at Atlassian, Figma, Asana and Shopify to customize a framework that works best for our use case.

We christened our design system Daikon. Tokenizing made it possible to support the Karat sub-brand called Brilliant Black Minds and client branding of the candidate portal. I was also responsible for driving the bi-weekly cadence with the Front end guild on all things Design System related.