Client: Prime Quadrant, a Canadian wealth management firm
Role: Design Thinking Consultant
Timeline: April 2026 – May 2026
Scope: Redesigning end-to-end onboarding experience across a 90-day (new) employee journey
Firm Scale: ~200+ employees | Privately-owned | High-net-worth client base
The Spreadsheet Dressed Up as an Experience
A Canadian wealth management firm managing private financial data for high-net-worth families was growing fast. New people were joining every month across different teams, and the L&D team was keeping up the only way they knew how — manually, one new joiner at a time.
The onboarding process lived in Asana. Not as a journey, not as a learning experience — as a task list organized by week. Every new employee was assigned to the same project and expected to work through it. Some tasks linked out to a website. Some pointed to long PDFs. Some were buried in SharePoint folders that were hard to find. Some didn’t explain why they mattered. There was no logic about what you needed to know first, or what could wait until week three, or what was only relevant to you if you worked in finance versus technology. It was a checklist. Finish the list, you’re done.
The problem was that completing the tasks didn’t mean you were equipped to be successful in your new role. Employees were working through the list and still not knowing how departments connected, what tools they were actually supposed to use, or where to find answers when something came up on the job. And when they didn’t know, they asked the L&D manager. Every time.
The firm had grown to a point where that wasn’t sustainable. Hiring hadn’t slowed down. The L&D team was drowning in operational work — not designing experiences, not improving them, just managing the churn of assigning the same task list to the next person who showed up.
That’s when they brought me in.
Starting With the Journey, Not the Content
When I came on as an external consultant, the first thing I did was resist the pull toward content. The easier path would have been to start reorganizing what already existed — tidying up the task list, shortening the documents. That’s not where I started.
The right starting point was the journey itself. Working closely with the L&D manager, I set out to understand what onboarding actually needed to look like — how people, processes, and technology were interacting for someone new to the firm. What did employees need to know on day one? What could wait until day seven, day thirty, day ninety? What was critical to feel oriented versus what was just noise?
The onboarding had been designed around what the L&D team needed to deliver, not around what the employee needed to receive. Those are different problems. One is a compliance and operations problem. The other is an experience problem. I was there to solve the second one — which meant mapping the journey before touching a single piece of content.
Common Sense Isn’t Always Common
The discovery process involved employee surveys, one-on-one interviews, and a need gap analysis — mapping what employees were encountering against what the onboarding was providing.
The finding that stuck with me most was about mental models. Things that seemed obvious to someone who’d been at the firm for two years were genuine blockers for someone in their first week. Not because those people weren’t capable — but because nobody had made the implicit explicit.
Three things kept coming up. First, the onboarding wasn’t self-serve — employees depended on the L&D manager to answer questions, which meant any spike in hiring or a day she was unavailable created a real bottleneck. Second, not everyone was familiar with Asana. Training formatted as a project management task list made sense to some people and none at all to others. And third, several tasks in the list were literally raw email copies — an email thread pasted into a task description, with no explanation of what the employee was supposed to do with it. Read it? Action it? Sign something? Nobody knew.
The training wasn’t scattered because anyone was careless. It was scattered because it had grown organically across tools, and nobody had ever stepped back to look at it as an experience end to end.
That shaped a lot of what came after. Good UX writing, clear signage, and directional cues throughout — not as decoration, but as orientation. The onboarding had to do the work of saying: here’s where you are, here’s what matters right now, here’s what comes next.
Fifty Tools and No Map
One of the more concrete problems the discovery surfaced was around technology. The firm used over 50 software tools. Nobody had defined which ones were relevant to which roles.
That meant a new employee joining as a project manager was looking at the same tool list as someone joining as a financial analyst — without any indication of which five tools they needed to start using on Monday.
I used card sorting to build the information architecture from scratch. Rather than presenting a flat list of everything, we organized content into logical buckets: HR and employee benefits, IT and tools, department functions, compliance and mandatory training. From there, we created role-based technology pathways — so employees only encountered the tools relevant to their function, introduced at a point in the journey where they had enough context to actually use them.
One decision that came out of that session shaped the whole technology section: we agreed that only org-wide tools belonged in the onboarding experience. The full list of 50-plus tools was real, but it wasn’t everyone’s problem on day one. Team-specific and role-specific tools would come later, introduced through their own channels once employees had enough context to use them. Starting with what was universal kept the experience grounded without making it feel incomplete.
It sounds straightforward in hindsight. But it required working closely with the L&D manager throughout — because I wasn’t a subject matter expert on this firm’s compliance requirements or internal culture. She knew which information was genuinely mandatory versus historically accumulated. Getting that right together was one of the more careful parts of the work.
Building the Journey in Phases
The structural centerpiece of the redesigned experience was the phased journey. Day one. Day thirty. Day sixty. End of the three-month probation period.
Each phase had a different purpose. Day one was about orientation — not overwhelming the employee, but giving them enough to feel grounded. By day thirty, they should know how the organization works and be starting to deliver in their role. By day sixty, their comfort level should be increasing alongside their responsibilities. By the end of probation, they should be self-sufficient — and in a position to become a resource for people who joined after them.
This was a deliberate departure from the task list model. The old approach expected employees to consume everything as fast as possible. The new one was designed around how people actually learn — progressively, with time to absorb and apply before the next layer comes in.
One early question was whether to bundle compliance and cybersecurity training into the onboarding experience itself. We decided against it. Compliance is a substantial topic in its own right — it involves legal steps, liability sign-offs, and formal requirements that deserve focused attention, not a slot in week one between “meet the team” and “here’s how expenses work.” On top of that, the firm’s Canadian and US employees had different compliance mandates, which meant any bundled approach would have required branching logic that quickly became unmanageable. Keeping compliance separate wasn’t a workaround — it was the cleaner solution.
We built the experience in Litmos, a learning management system. Litmos is not the most intuitive tool to work in — it took me about two weeks of tutorials and trial-and-error before I felt comfortable using it. But it gave us what we needed: the ability to sequence content, track completion across the 90-day window, and send automated reminders so employees could see where they were in the journey without the L&D manager having to follow up individually.
We also developed a simple visual design system within the platform — a consistent color code for call-to-action items, and a separate one for critical information. Nothing elaborate, but it gave employees visual cues about what required action versus what was reference material.
What Fewer Questions Tells You
The clearest signal that something had changed was this: the L&D manager stopped fielding as many clarifying questions.
That might sound like a small thing. It wasn’t. Before the redesign, employees were regularly coming back to her to ask things the onboarding was supposed to answer. Where’s the policy on this? Which tool do I use for that? Who do I talk to about benefits? Those questions were a symptom of an experience that wasn’t doing its job.
After the rollout, employees could find what they were looking for within the training itself. They knew the journey was structured — that they weren’t expected to know everything on day one, that there was a pathway, and that answers existed somewhere they could access on their own. That shift from dependency to self-sufficiency was exactly what the L&D manager had been hoping for. It also meant she could get back to the work she was hired to do.
What I Carry Forward
Most design projects start with content. This one confirmed why that’s often the wrong place to start.
On this project, the sequence was reversed — information architecture first, then layout, then content. The content itself was never really the problem; it existed, it was specific, and it was largely accurate. The challenge was how to present it so it would actually land. Once the IA defined the flow — what comes first, what comes second, how the stages connect — the layout followed. And the layout shaped how the content sat in the learner’s mind.
That’s the thing I carry forward: packaging is part of the experience. The same information written as a long paragraph and sent in an email lands very differently than the same information broken into visual blocks, sequenced deliberately, and delivered in chunks sized for how adults actually learn. The way something is delivered determines whether it gets absorbed or ignored. For anyone designing employee learning experiences, that’s not a production detail — it’s a design decision.
External consultant | ~200-employee Canadian wealth management firm | Redesigned onboarding across a 90-day employee journey
