Elevating manager performance
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.
"What do I do now, and how do I do it?"
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.
Impact
4.0
customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
Leaders were the most satisfied with Coach, with it exceeding their expectations for individualised and relevant guidance. Managers and ICs were less satisfied, voicing frustrations with the effort and time it took to provide Coach with context and then work through the steps of guidance.
45%
product market fit score
When measuring product-market fit using the "very disappointed" metric (where 40% is considered the threshold for product-market fit), Coach resonated more effectively with management-level users.
8.1
average queries per session
Conversations with 4 or more queries were considered ‘deep usage’ and was a metric we used to indicate achieving value for users.
“I need AI Coach! I do not have this support in my workplace & the value is exponential.”
