Introducing DE&I on CharlieHR

Overview

When there’s no brief, you write one

This was my first zero-to-one. Charlie’s leadership knew they wanted a DE&I feature. Premium subscribers were churning and DE&I was the strategic bet, but nobody could say what it should actually be. There were no objectives, no success metrics, and competing ideas about who it was even for.

My job wasn’t just to design something. It was to figure out what to design, make the case for it, and bring a team and a set of stakeholders with me, across 10-week delivery cycles that couldn’t slip.

Final designs: admin setup, team member data collection form, diversity section homepage and company report

Creating Clarity

Making something to react to

When a brief is vague, waiting for someone to sharpen it rarely works. Instead, I started discovery in parallel with stakeholder conversations: not to validate a direction, but to build enough of a point of view to put something concrete in front of people.

Within the first week, I used what we were learning to draft a Feature Roadmap. Not a final plan: a proposal. Something stakeholders could agree with, push back on, or redirect. It was a tool for getting to alignment faster than any number of open-ended workshops would have.

The Feature Roadmap made the scope tangible and gave stakeholders something to react to rather than invent from scratch.

It also helped contain scope drift. Between cycles, leadership wanted to shift the target audience from HR Advice customers to a broader Premium tier, driven by Sales and Marketing rather than any new customer insight. By having a roadmap already in place, I could acknowledge the change, flag the research gap it would create, and protect the current cycle’s focus while agreeing to revisit it after the MVP shipped.

Discovery

Finding the right problem to own

I led the team through user interviews, desk research and sessions with DE&I consultants to understand how HR leads actually approached diversity strategy. Three consistent problems emerged:

All three were real. But not all three were ours to solve. Problem 1 was a knowledge and confidence gap, better addressed through content and consulting than software. Problem 3 required expert guidance that a product team couldn’t scale. Problem 2 was the gap a product could fill: a structured, repeatable process for collecting and reporting on diversity data that any company could follow without a consultant in the room.

We scoped to Problem 2. Product Marketing would own Problem 1; HR Advice would own Problem 3. Saying clearly what we weren’t building was as important as defining what we were.

Design

Designing for sensitive data

DE&I data sits under UK protected characteristics law. That’s not a background consideration; it’s a constraint that shapes every design decision. Employees who choose to share diversity information do so anonymously, and it is illegal to identify or single out an individual based on what they’ve disclosed. The design had to make it structurally difficult to work out who said what.

Mapping the full data lifecycle (setup, collection, reporting) made the tradeoffs visible. Some features we wanted to build simply couldn’t exist without creating identification risk. Others required deliberate friction: confirmation steps, anonymity thresholds before data could be shown in aggregate, and in-product guidance to set expectations at every stage.

Mapping the full setup, collection and reporting journey made the legal and ethical complexity visible and showed stakeholders why certain shortcuts weren’t options.

Information architecture

Usability testing revealed that users struggled to find DE&I features when organised by task, because they didn’t think in tasks, they thought in topics. We created a dedicated space under Company > Diversity rather than distributing features across existing task-based menus.

Building on existing patterns

Users were intimidated by the topic and trusted Charlie to guide them responsibly. Rather than designing from scratch, I mapped DE&I flows onto existing Charlie interaction patterns, adapting forms and reporting components users already understood, and adding deliberate friction points and contextual guidance where the stakes were higher.

Reflection

On strategic bets and market timing

I left CharlieHR before the feature launched. What I can speak to is the process: how to create structure where there isn’t any, how to protect a team from scope drift, and how to make design decisions when the constraints are legal rather than aesthetic.

The feature exists, but it isn’t widely used. DE&I dropped off the priority list for small and mid-size businesses as quickly as it had risen. That’s not a failure of execution; it’s a reminder that product success depends on market timing as much as design quality. The bet made sense in 2021. The world moved on.

What I’d carry forward: start with something concrete earlier. The feature roadmap was the right tool. I’d reach for it faster next time.