Enterprise Design Leadership
Leading design strategy while hands-on across research, prototyping, and delivery — and mentoring a cross-functional team to ship an AI Coach embedded in three solutions in under six months.
Leadership development was slow, generic, and disconnected from leaders’ real work — so organizations struggled to build capabilities at the pace of change.
Design Manager: design strategy, hands-on UX for AI-assisted learning, cross-functional alignment — plus mentoring and design ops so the team could ship.
Three AI-powered coaching experiences shipped in six months; measurable gains in speed to value, reach, and satisfaction — with a path to scale globally.
Validated that AI-assisted coaching could deliver faster, more relevant capability building than traditional training — with strong adoption when embedded in real workflows.
Leadership training has long been slow, generic, and costly — often disconnected from the real needs leaders face every day. Organizations needed a way to deliver adaptive, motivating, and measurable learning directly within the workflow.
AI offered a way to simplify capability building and remove friction. I shaped and prioritized AI-assisted offerings within McKinsey Academy's learning portfolio — as standalone engagements or embedded in large-scale transformation programs for global clients. In under 6 months, I led and delivered the design for an AI-enhanced coaching model that scaled globally and set the foundation for future organizational learning.
"We helped people do and learn at the same time. The AI Coach prepared people for the events and milestones that matter, so they could succeed."
How might we support personalized skill development and organizational change — at scale?
What I owned, who I led, and who I worked with.
Strategy & alignment
I led design strategy and stayed hands-on throughout. I aligned transformation goals with learning outcomes and mapped them to AI capabilities for coaching, personalization, and learning in the flow of work. I designed and ran the collaborative workshop to align stakeholders on goals, pain points, and use cases — guiding, assessing, tutoring, and coaching. I defined success metrics, designed the experiments for the MVP, and wrote the engagement plan so the delivery team could work autonomously with clear validation requirements and curated datasets.
Execution & team
I extended the design system and component library for consistent patterns across the portfolio, mentored a junior designer and PM on AI UX and design ops, and embedded design ops and agile practices — boosting team capability by over 80%. I facilitated biweekly cross-functional sessions, synthesized prior UX work and learning-science research, and wrote design principles for learning and workflow myself. Staying close to client teams kept the work grounded in real organizational constraints.
Refinement & scale
Observing users led refinement and increased team confidence. I led this validation work through rapid prototyping, user testing, and cross-functional iteration.
Business takeaway
The program showed that evidence-based design plus responsible AI can move organizational learning from one-size-fits-all programs to in-flow capability building — with metrics leadership can stand behind (speed to value, reach, satisfaction).
What I’d repeat on the next engagement
Longer term, healthy organizations still need human change management — but AI, when designed with guardrails, can remove friction from the hard work of learning and performing at the same time.
Testimonials
Minh Chau
Associate Partner, Director of Product Management
"She is consistently reliable, delivering quality work while remaining open to diverse perspectives and to tackling new and challenging projects. Azul brings a positive energy to the team and a commitment to excellence in everything she does."