A research-first sprint that created a new Workday product — now adopted by 50+ enterprise customers within its first launch.
Engagement
Market Research, Concept Prototyping & Usability
Client
Workday — Enterprise HR & finance platform
Duration
Multi-phase · research → concept → ship
§01 · At a Glance
A new product line born out of research — not a feature request that got promoted.
Read time · 6 minutes Published 2026 · FutureProof
Customers Researched
40+
enterprise HR leaders, org designers, and workforce planners interviewed across industries.
Concept Iterations
05
prototype cycles tested against real org-design workflows before the final shape was locked.
Usability Rounds
03
moderated usability studies against the build, feeding directly into engineering sprints.
Launch Customers
50+
enterprise customers adopted Org Studio in its first launch wave.
§02 · The Challenge
Org design lived in spreadsheets the platform couldn't see.
Enterprise org design — who reports to whom, how teams are structured, what changes when a reorg happens — was one of the highest-stakes workflows in the business. And it was happening almost entirely in static spreadsheets and slide decks, outside of Workday.
HR leaders would design a new structure on paper, socialise it across leadership, revise it, then hand it to HRIS to implement manually. Every round took weeks. Every round introduced errors. The data that drove the design lived in the platform; the design itself didn't.
The problem beneath the problem
Workday had the data. Customers had the need. The product to connect them didn't exist yet.
01
Org design is inherently iterative — leaders want to model, compare, and socialise multiple scenarios before committing. Spreadsheets support that; a production system-of-record doesn't.
02
The handoff from "designed in a spreadsheet" to "implemented in Workday" was manual, slow, and error-prone. A reorg approved on Tuesday might not be live in the system until the following month.
03
No product in the suite was built to be both a modelling surface and a write-back surface. Every attempt to retrofit an existing tool compromised one of those jobs.
“
The workflow already existed in the customer base. It just didn't exist inside the platform. Our job was to prove it should.
FutureProof thesis
§03 · The Approach
Three moves that turned a research hunch into a shipped product.
Multi-phase · research-driven · prototypes every fortnight
01
Move · Market Discovery
Prove the workflow exists — with evidence, not anecdote.
We ran structured interviews with 40+ enterprise HR leaders, org designers, and workforce planners. The frame wasn't "would you buy this feature" — it was "walk us through the last reorg you ran." The artefacts people pulled out told us everything: spreadsheets, whiteboards, PowerPoint stack after PowerPoint stack. The workflow was real. The opportunity was real.
Iterate the product shape in five rounds — before any engineer touched it.
Instead of writing a spec and handing it to engineering, we built five prototype iterations and tested each against real org-design workflows. The product shape settled into place: a canvas for modelling, a diff view for comparing scenarios, and a clean write-back to the system of record. Each round killed assumptions that a PRD would have preserved.
We ran three moderated usability rounds against the actual build, feeding findings directly into engineering sprints. The goal was simple: no HR leader should hit a wall in their first reorg with the product. Each round caught issues the prototype hadn't surfaced — production data volumes, permission edge cases, cross-team socialisation flows.
Why this engagement needed researchers who understood the platform.
A generalist UX team would have designed the ideal org-design tool. But "ideal" and "ships inside Workday" aren't the same thing.
Designing a new product inside a mature enterprise platform means working inside a set of constraints that aren't written down anywhere — data models, permissions, customer extensibility, release cadence, upgrade paths. A concept that doesn't respect those constraints will never ship.
Our team had spent years inside Workday. We knew which design moves would survive the platform and which would die in a security review. That's why the concept arrived ship-ready, not just polished.
"A new product inside an enterprise platform isn't a design problem. It's a platform-literacy problem wearing a design costume."
§05 · Impact
A new Workday product. Shipped. Adopted. Still in the suite.
Primary outcome
Shipped.
Org Studio launched inside the Workday suite. Not a lab. Not a beta. A product line customers pay for.
Adoption outcome
50+
Enterprise customers onboarded in the first launch wave. Adoption has continued since.
What the engagement delivered
01
A market-validated concept — the reason Workday greenlit a new product line rather than stretching an existing one.
02
Five prototype iterations that settled the product's core mechanics (canvas / diff / write-back) before a single line of production code was written.
03
A research-to-engineering pipeline — usability findings flowed into sprints week-over-week, not quarter-over-quarter.
04
Org design moved inside the platform — customers stopped doing it in spreadsheets and handing it to HRIS to implement manually.
05
A durable product line — Org Studio is still part of the Workday suite and has continued to add customers beyond the launch wave.
§06 · Work With FutureProof
Thinking about a new product line? Start with the workflow already happening outside your platform.
If your customers are doing work in spreadsheets that ought to live inside your product, that's not a feature gap — it's a product-line opportunity. And it needs research, not a PRD.
We start with a $500 AI Readiness Audit. Five days. You'll come out with a clear view of where the gap is and what it would take to close it.