Salesforce × Slack Employee Experience

Reimagining the employee experience at Salesforce through Slack.

Designing five strategic concepts for Salesforce's internal communications and collaboration — achieving 4.5/5 satisfaction scores with 100% of participants preferring the new experience.

Pilot Regions Engaged

Core Employee Segments Studied

Validated Concepts & Experiences

4.5/5

User Satisfaction Score

100%

Preferred New Experience vs. Current State

User Stories Delivered

The challenge

Following Salesforce's acquisition of Slack, IBM Consulting was contracted to design an enterprise employee experience platform for a rapidly growing company. The ask: leverage IBM's Slack expertise. IBM operated the world's largest Slack deployment, with 300K+ daily users globally, to make Slack the operating system for the entire Salesforce employee experience.

The challenge was real. With 50,000+ employees across dozens of countries, Salesforce's internal experience had fractured under rapid growth. Employees juggled multiple communication platforms, collaboration tools, and approval systems that didn't talk to each other. Onboarding was siloed, task management fragmented, and important communications were getting lost in the noise.

Our research confirmed it: employees were overwhelmed, exhausted by tool-switching, and struggling to stay informed. The opportunity was clear, redesign Slack as the single intelligent home base where work actually happens.

The solution

We designed an intelligent, personalized Slack-centric employee experience platform built around five interconnected concepts. Through workshops, field research, and iterative user validation, we created a unified ecosystem bringing task management, onboarding, IT support, and communications into a single, cohesive experience — one that felt like it belonged in Slack rather than bolted onto it.

The platform was grounded in four core design principles that guided every decision:

🎯

Personalization

Experiences tailored to each employee's role, team, and working patterns — surfacing what's relevant, when it's needed.

🔔

Guided Tasks

Intelligent notifications and reminders that reduce cognitive load — helping employees stay on top of what matters without constant context-switching.

🏠

No Place Like Home

One seamless workspace for everything — onboarding, tasks, communications, and support — so employees never have to leave Slack to get work done.

👁️

Transparency

Real-time visibility into task progress, request status, and team activity — replacing uncertainty with clarity at every step.

What I did

As Executive Design Director and IBM Garage Program Lead, I led the end-to-end design engagement — from research and concept development through validation and roadmap definition.

🔍

Led Discovery & Research

Conducted a cross-functional listening tour across departments and geographies, synthesizing employee pain points, workflow gaps, and unmet communication needs into actionable design insights.

🎯

Defined 3 Strategic Concepts

Developed three distinct key experience concepts, each addressing a different dimension of employee experience — from onboarding to manager effectiveness to culture and recognition.

🧪

Led Concept Validation

Tested each concept with representative employee groups across functions, gathering both quantitative satisfaction scores and qualitative feedback to refine and prioritize.

🗺️

Built Strategic Roadmap

Synthesized research and validation findings into a prioritized roadmap with clear business cases — enabling Salesforce leadership to make confident investment decisions.

Product features and benefits

🚀

Intelligent Onboarding

Surfaces relevant context, team introductions, and key resources for new hires automatically — reducing time-to-productivity and eliminating the first-day information overload experience.

🔗

Collaboration Templates

Cross-functional templates that reduce coordination overhead for recurring workflows — project kick-offs, stakeholder updates, and decision tracking — all within Slack's native experience.

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Knowledge Hub Integration

Brings institutional knowledge directly into conversations — surfacing relevant documentation, past decisions, and subject matter experts at the moment of need.

📊

Manager Effectiveness Tools

Lightweight tools supporting one-on-ones, team health tracking, and goal alignment — giving managers visibility into team sentiment without adding administrative overhead.

🎉

Culture & Recognition

Recognition and culture-building patterns that work within existing communication flows — making appreciation visible and reinforcing company values without forcing new behaviors.

Measurable impact and value delivered

⭐

4.5 out of 5 Employee Satisfaction Rating

Satisfaction scores averaged 4.5 out of 5 across all tested concepts — with qualitative feedback highlighting reduced cognitive load, improved information findability, and stronger connection across distributed teams.

✅

100% Universal Preference

100% of participants preferred the new experience over existing tools — a decisive validation signal that drove executive confidence in the roadmap investment.

📈

The Efficacy of Customer Zero - The Salesforce Slack Enterprise Case Study

The project became an internal reference case for how Salesforce sells Slack's employee experience capabilities to enterprise clients — showing what's possible when the company acts as 'Customer Zero'.