Inspirus

Project Background

Inspirus is a hundred-year-old employee engagement company. We partnered with the leadership team to define, design, and develop a new employee engagement platform. Through this work, we helped them pivot their business model and modernize the platform to better serve their customers and helped the company execute an ambitious strategy in an accelerated timeline.

Approach

Together with the technology and product leadership team, we built on their lean and agile methodologies to incorporate a human-centered design approach to prioritization and implementation. Working in concert with a distributed development team, we shipped the first MVP in 6 months.

Outcome

After two years of collaboration, the new platform was widely adopted by the existing customer base and supported the company’s market expansion goals. Shortly after, Inspirus was acquired by Sodexo, one of the largest private employers worldwide.

I can’t believe what we achieved in such a short time. Our Executives from Germany were very impressed. We are so grateful for Liya’s professional facilitation, guidance and her great and lovely personality.

Margarete Wies, VP Advanced UX Design, Mercedes-Benz

Liya James is a highly passionate, energetic, and engaging user experience designer, design thinking evangelist, advocate, coach, and facilitator. She is the kind of person you want in your organization and/or on your team who guides and empowers employees of all “ranks” to transform their business and/or day-to-day work from a traditional engineering-led to a design-led culture that delivers human-centric outcomes.

Uwe Zimmermann, Senior Product Design Manager, IBM

Liya and her team have worked with me on a number of different startups to research and validate product and market opportunities. Their strategic support was invaluable especially in the early stages of developing our ideas. The insights enabled us to make rapid decisions on how to move forward with our business ideas when it really mattered.

Liya is able to quickly understand your business needs, parse the essence of the problem you're dealing with, identify creative solutions, guide you through a process to flesh them out, and then communicate it in a way that makes it seem so simple that you wonder how you missed it all along. I have worked with her in each startup I've been a part of and will surely continue to do so in the future. I can't recommend her highly enough.

Matt Garmur, Product Manager, Meta

Seth Blaustein, Founder & CEO, Dollar Donation Club