World Economic Forum | Internal SaaS Platform
2023 - 2026
Impact
Led design strategy for Forum Spaces, the World Economic Forum's internal SaaS platform that scaled from 2 pilot initiatives to 200+ launched spaces. Drove 10M page visits, 3.8M unique visitors, 18K sign-ups, and 675% engagement growth over two years. Platform became the default digital operating system with institutional buy-in to roll out across all WEF centers. Check out the website!
My Role: Senior Design Strategist (5 years, progressing from UX Researcher) — Experience strategy, research lead (125+ discovery sessions across 5 continents), cross-functional alignment, team management
The Problem
WEF initiatives produce massive amounts of research, events, and multi-year programs supported by curated communities of experts. But they lacked a dedicated digital operating system to showcase work and engage communities beyond flagship moments like Davos.
The result: Engagement was episodic. Content was fragmented across tools. Impact was hard to scale.
Initiatives needed more than a website—they needed a repeatable way to launch and run engagement as an operating model. But it had to meet public sector governance standards, brand quality expectations, and work for teams with limited technical capacity.
The challenge: Enable every initiative to launch a high-quality digital home quickly while balancing speed, governance, flexibility, and institutional trust.
Moenika @ The World Economic Forum Offices in Cologny, Switzerland
Strategic Approach
I treated this as service design, not just product design. Forum Spaces has always been people-first. We're here for every initiative to make their platforms successful, and that goes beyond shipping features.
My hypothesis for scale: Adoption would grow when we combined flexible self-service tools with high-touch human support tailored to each initiative's maturity and goals.
How I Balanced Competing Needs
Speed, quality, flexibility, and governance often conflict. We managed this through a clear staged process:
Customer success team handles Forum Space requests
Engagement team runs pre-discovery to assess needs and classify service tier
I run structured design discovery to capture vision, goals, and content requirements
Throughout, we assess governance requirements and timeline constraints
Standard delivery is one week for designs, with buffer capacity for urgent requests and flagship events
This workflow let us maintain quality while moving fast, and flex when initiatives needed us most.
Research as a Continuous Insight Engine
I conduct one-hour discovery sessions with every initiative that wants a Forum Space. This created both a delivery loop and a research system—125+ sessions across 5 continents with initiatives ranging from early pilots to mature global programs.
I work cross-culturally with initiative owners from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The initiatives come to us with a universal problem: no one-stop-shop for sector-specific content, no ability to own it themselves, and no community platform to convene stakeholders.
Understanding Our Users
A core user archetype shaped our approach: institutional leaders like public sector digital leaders who require trust, compliance, and stakeholder coordination. They need platforms that meet governance and brand standards, tools they can manage with limited technical capacity, and spaces that enable ongoing engagement—not just one-off campaigns.
I interview dozens of users like this per week and create customized experiences for each. This deep user knowledge drives every strategic decision.
Key insight: Initiatives didn't just need a website. They needed repeatable templates that reduce effort and guardrails that protect quality.
Our user, Alistair, and his needs.
Key Strategic Decisions
Decision 1: Build a Platform, Not Pages
The tension: Initiatives wanted bespoke, agency-built sites. But that model couldn't scale to 200+ initiatives without massive cost and inconsistency.
My decision: Prioritize reusable templates, governance, and onboarding over one-off builds.
Why this worked: Template-driven building increased quality while reducing effort. Copy-and-paste functionality (which I spearheaded) let initiatives duplicate pages and widgets, improving consistency and cutting time-to-launch. This was especially valuable for initiatives with repeated structures—like Global Plastic Action Partnership, which runs National Plastic Action Partnerships across countries. Each country needed a dedicated page. Without copy-and-paste, teams recreated pages from scratch. With it, they could create a template once, duplicate it, then customize per country.
Trade-off: Less flexibility for edge cases. But standardization was the unlock for scale.
Decision 2: Service Model Design (Start, Advanced, Ecosystem Tiers)
The challenge: Not every initiative needs the same level of support. Treating all requests equally created bottlenecks and misallocated resources.
What I did: Introduced tiered service levels to match support intensity to initiative maturity:
Start: Public space only
Advanced: Public and member space with light usage
Ecosystem: Full community setup plus engagement support
Impact: Increased throughput without sacrificing quality. Enabled scaling from 2 to 200+ initiatives by matching resources to actual needs.
Decision 3: Process as Product
The insight: Adoption needs an operating model. Process design is part of the product, not separate from it.
What I built: End-to-end onboarding workflow with clear stage gates:
Initiative raises official case in internal system
Engagement team runs pre-discovery and classifies service tier
I run one-hour discovery to capture vision, goals, audience, content needs
I build initial space template in the builder
I deliver design and run training session
Initiative team customizes their space
I run final design review and green-light publication
Strategic impact: Reduced ambiguity for initiatives and internal teams. Created a scalable model for stakeholder alignment that could support organizational growth.
Decision 4: AI Experimentation with Limits
The opportunity: Modern website builders introduced AI creation features. We needed to test what AI could do while protecting narrative quality.
What I led: I initiated the research based on my direct knowledge of what users provide at onboarding—typically a one-pager describing mission, workstreams, and impact. In my process, I translate that into information architecture and map it to building blocks:
Mission statements → information widget
Impact stats → counter widgets
Program content → structured sections
I mapped this logic so the AI assistant could place the right content into the right widgets. The team replicated my discovery interview approach through a chatbot that gathered inputs via guided prompts.
What worked: AI captured structured inputs and populated widgets with the right content types. It reduced manual effort for early draft generation and accelerated scaffolding.
What failed: The AI missed the storytelling layer. It could populate content blocks but couldn't build a narrative experience that guides users through a journey. Without story, pages felt generic and lacked coherent flow.
The strategic decision: Redirect AI investment toward content structuring assistance while preserving human-led narrative design. AI handles scaffolding; I focus discovery on engagement strategy and storytelling. This informed our 2026 roadmap and established design principles for future automation—not a blanket "yes" or "no" to AI, but a clear division of labor.
How our interview with Alistair turns into product delivery requirements.
What We Built
Forum Spaces is an internal platform that enables initiatives to run a tiered experience end-to-end:
Public site creation and editing (internal website builder)
Member community engagement features
Event promotion and hosting for member communities
Knowledge publishing for reports and updates
Integration with Forum's Salesforce CMS
Analytics and performance visibility
Example scenario: The Transitioning Material Systems team can publish a new report publicly, host an event for members, and keep discussion active through community features—without needing separate tools or relying on flagship events as the main engagement moment.
Outcomes
Since launch:
10M pages visited
3.8M unique visitors
18K sign-ups
200+ initiatives launched (from 2 pilot initiatives)
2025 performance:
4.2M pages visited (+31% vs. 2024)
1.8M unique visitors (+33% vs. 2024)
8,400 sign-ups (+35% vs. 2024)
Search performance:
30M total impressions
350K total clicks
Engagement growth:
675% increase in user engagement
2M+ visitors over two years
Organizational change:
Forum Spaces evolved from a pilot into a platform being rolled out for every initiative. It became the default digital operating system for initiatives to scale engagement and impact, with institutional buy-in from WEF leadership.
What I Learned
Adoption needs an operating model.
Process design and service models are part of the product. You can't scale a platform without scaling the system around it.
Continuous discovery scales platforms.
Onboarding can be structured research, not just support. Every new initiative became both a delivery and research loop, improving our service model and feeding the roadmap with real user needs.
Template-driven building increases quality.
Copy-and-paste reduced effort while improving consistency and governance. Standardization isn't a compromise—it's the unlock for scale.
AI is useful for acceleration, not narrative.
It can draft structure, but storytelling still requires strategy. The division of labor matters more than the technology itself.
What I'd do differently:
Train initiative teams to become power users who can support peer initiatives earlier, creating a center of excellence model that reduces central bottlenecks. Use engagement data patterns across 200+ initiatives to build a predictive model—identifying which initiative types, content structures, and community features succeed fastest to inform proactive recommendations during discovery.
Note: Screenshots and examples are intentionally limited to public outputs and redacted visuals to protect internal systems and confidential information. More details are available in conversation.