Daniel Spagnolo (He/Him) | Product Designer

AI coaching for overwhelmed managers

Elevating manager performance

Initial AI Coach screen shown on a mobile device. Copy reads 'Hi there what's on your mind today? I can help you navigate difficult conversations, provide constructive feedback, and make critical decisions with confidence.' Floating around the outside of the screen are examples of questions managers can ask. Examples are 'how do I have a difficult conversation with my team?', 'What should I focus on to increase engagement?', and 'I want to role play a one-on-one.'

Culture Amp (Melbourne, AUS)

3 months (from prototype to early customer release)

Product team

Product manager: (temp) Daniel Billingham

Delivery manager: Scarlett Killaly

Team engineering lead: Jay Linsell

ML engineer: Paul Truong

FE engineers: (temp) Kitty Allen, Nicholas Wong

AI/data scientists: Paul Truong, Xiaopei Wu

People scientist + AI experience architect: Greta Bradman

UX researchers: Lucy Oldridge, Shya Castillo

Product designer: Me

Support roles

Legal: Marc Bonavia

My role / skills

Design lead: UX and UI, AI design patterns, user research and testing, stakeholder management, vision and systems thinking

The problem

Leaders and managers frequently face navigating complex interpersonal dynamics like difficult conversations, providing quality feedback, and communicating effectively with peers and direct reports. Existing resources, such as timely high-quality coaching, are typically expensive or provide generic, broad guidance that aren’t tailored to specific situations or organisational contexts. This can lead them to use inadequate, generic AI tools which pose data privacy concerns and lack grounding in relevant context and data.

The opportunity

How might we create a coaching platform that provides immediate, private, and contextually relevant guidance for specific leadership and management challenges?

Leaders and managers need information and a confidential space where they can reflect, learn, and determine contextually relevant actions to improve their performance over time. In an increasingly complex workplace, they need granular, action-oriented support on "what do I do now, and how do I do it?". Without this, they lack the clarity, speed, and confidence to effectively handle challenging situations.

TL;DR

The solution

We released a market-ready AI Coach product to help leaders and managers struggling to access timely, high-quality coaching. Coach is an AI-powered, interactive tool designed to provide real-time performance coaching. It addresses the lack of readily available, high-quality guidance by offering immediate, structured support for navigating workplace challenges, particularly difficult conversations, performance reviews, and feedback.

By leveraging insights from Culture Amp’s expert People Science and Organisational Psychology knowledge and interacting through a conversational interface, Coach helps leaders and managers to:

  • Gain clarity: Organising thoughts, gain insights, and get structured recommendations
  • Build confidence: Receive expert-backed conversation guidance to feel more assured in their approach
  • Improve outcomes: Communicate effectively and manage interpersonal dynamics with ease
  • Practice in a judgment-free space: Use role playing and structured tools to refine their approach before real-life discussions.

Whether users are giving 1-on-1 feedback, delivering tough news to a group, or addressing conflict, AI Coach helps users increase their speed to impactful action and approach conversations with confidence and empathy.

Desktop and mobile versions shown. AI conversation thread reads - manager: 'I need to give feedback to a team member who is consistently late to meetings. What's the best approach?', ai coach: 'Thanks for bringing this to me. Being on time for meetings is certainly important for team effectiveness. Could you tell me a bit more about how this lateness is impacting the team and any conversations you've had with them about it so far?'
The standalone AI Coach product — helping managers with real-time performance coaching.
Desktop and mobile versions shown. AI conversation thread reads - manager: 'I need to give feedback to a team member who is consistently late to meetings. What's the best approach?', ai coach: 'Thanks for bringing this to me. Being on time for meetings is certainly important for team effectiveness. Could you tell me a bit more about how this lateness is impacting the team and any conversations you've had with them about it so far?'
Integration of AI Coach into the Engagement product (right hand drawer) — helping managers take action on team engagement survey data.

Impact

4.0

CSAT score

45%

product market fit score

8.1

average queries per session

Full casestudy coming soon 🤓