Scott Aquilino
Duration: 8 Sprints
Context and Problem
At Dayforce, goals were central to performance, development, and promotion conversations, but the experience was fragmented and largely treated as static record-keeping. As Lead Product Designer, I led an initiative to rethink goals across the Performance Management ecosystem, defining a future vision that connected individual growth, business outcomes, and AI-assisted guidance.
Core Problems
- Fragmented across career development and performance reviews
- Engagement dropped significantly after creation
- Alignment to company objectives was unclear or invisible
- Managers relied on manual recall during evaluations
Opportunity
- Transform goals into a system that connects performance, and development in order to drive business outcomes for our customers
Process
Instead of focusing on incremental UX improvements, I helped us zoom out and reframed the work as a system-level opportunity, leading cross-functional discovery and defining a long-term product direction grounded in research and feasibility.
Discovery & Insight Generation
- Competitive analysis, secondary research, and customer data synthesis
- Concept testing with both employee and manager user types in order to validate direction
Key Learnings
- Users want help getting started, not automation taking over
- The blank page is the biggest barrier
- Managers need fast visibility into risk and progress
- Lightweight interactions outperform heavy workflows
Strategic Direction
Through cross functional workshops I helped the team generate and navigate critical product questions without forcing premature decisions:
- Benefits of different goal setting frameworks
- Role of OKRs across different user types
- Relationship between goals and development plans
- Ownership of goal weighting and evaluation
- Boundaries and responsibility of AI in the experience
Helping to create clarity and opportunity out of ambiguity while keeping the solution space open
Experience Principles
Leveraging market and user researcher I established a set of principles used across Product, Design, and Engineering to help guide decision making throughout the project:
- AI as assistive, not authoritative
- Reduce friction without removing agency
- Make alignment visible and contextual
- Design for progress, not static tracking
- Balance enterprise complexity with usability
From Vision to Execution
I translated the vision into structured, buildable direction and designed future-state concepts across the full goal lifecycle.
- AI-assisted goal creation
- Embedded alignment visibility
- Lightweight progress updates
- Manager insight dashboards
- Goal-driven performance reviews
I defined a phased roadmap designed to take us from Table stakes to Market leading to Innovative goal setting aligning teams around a North Star while enabling incremental delivery
Result
This work repositioned goals from a functional feature to a strategic system, shaping how performance and growth are approached within Dayforce.
- Established a North Star vision adopted across Product, Design, and Engineering
- Delivered a phased roadmap influencing the next few years of upcoming releases.
- Aligned multiple cross-functional stakeholders across different teams around a shared direction
Outcomes
This initiative transformed goals into a strategic lever, aligning cross-functional teams, guiding investment decisions, and shaping Dayforce’s long-term vision for performance and career growth.
- Shifted internal focus from tactical UX improvements to system-level strategy
- Introduced a prioritization framework used to guide ongoing investment decisions
- Contributed to broader exploration of a career growth–oriented platform direction