Modernizing a survey platform into a DEI analytics tool.
A decade old, with no owner.
PwC Listen had been built piecemeal for five or six years, one client request at a time. A survey feature here, an analytics feature there, with no roadmap holding it together. Six product owners cycled through in six years, so it kept losing direction and history. It was also sold and used differently inside and outside the firm: internal teams ran it as a general survey tool, while clients used it for DEI. People showed up expecting one product and found another, and it was slipping behind Qualtrics and Medallia.
Research first, then a foundation.
On a 14-week clock I led interviews with clients, contextual inquiry with PwC employees, and cognitive walkthroughs with the product owner, then turned it into personas and journeys for each user type. Research surfaced two splits: the buyers weren't the users, and internal teams used Listen as a survey tool while clients used it for DEI. I redesigned the survey-creation experience for both audiences, internal superusers who expected Qualtrics and clients used to the SurveyMonkey model, reframed the platform toward DEI, and modernized the data visualization on reports that were too thin to be useful. The piece that made everything faster was a design system that drove prototyping, twice-a-week testing, and handoff to the dev team.
Measurable gains across the board.
Across internal and external users the redesign lifted task success, session length, and satisfaction together. It moved Listen from a basic survey tool competing with SurveyMonkey toward a comprehensive DEI platform competing with Qualtrics and Medallia, and left the team a roadmap to keep building from as they hired their own designers.