Missions
03
PRODUCT STRATEGY · CONTENT DESIGN · CSR
Missions: Doubling Adoption by Doing Less
Company
Benevity
Role
Dir. Product Design + Dir. Product
Timeline
2017-2022
Key Result
100% YOY client adoption
Module Type
CSR Engagement / Gamification
The Situation Missions is a module within Benevity’s platform that uses gamification, including challenges, activity tracking, and points, to encourage employees to take part in their company’s Corporate Social Responsibility-related initiatives. I worked directly with Benevity’s CEO to envision what it could be, led the early prototype design, and later took ownership of the content strategy that would determine whether the feature succeeded in the market. The prevailing belief, shared by the product team and by clients themselves, was that bigger content drops were better: large libraries of 200+ actions released in comprehensive batches. This logic felt right. It was wrong.
The Approach The large releases were creating cognitive overload. Administrators faced with 200 actions to organize lost momentum. Users encountering a massive catalogue often chose nothing. I proposed moving to four or five smaller, tightly themed releases per year and was met with real resistance internally. I pushed back by going directly to decision-makers at client companies myself, not waiting for aggregated survey data. What I heard was unambiguous: a curated, timely release they could actually use was worth more than a library they didn’t have the bandwidth to navigate.
The Outcome The number of clients actively using Missions doubled year-over-year from 2020. The growth wasn’t driven by a product overhaul. It was driven by a content strategy built on listening more carefully than the organization had before. The feature designed to simplify employee engagement had been producing its own kind of paralysis, and removing that friction turned out to be one of the most impactful design decisions of the entire initiative.