Design Thinking in HR.

Building Tools Managers Actually Love.

In today's fast-paced work environment, managers juggle countless responsibilities while trying to lead their teams effectively. Yet many of the HR tools designed to help them end up creating more work instead. Let's explore how design thinking can revolutionise people management tools.

The Manager's Dilemma

Let's be honest: most HR tools and frameworks land with a thud when introduced to busy managers. They laugh, get frustrated, or simply ignore them altogether. Why? Because these tools are often built for processes, not people.

Research suggests that managers with technical responsibilities who lead teams of 10 people can spend up to 20 hours per month on administration and team management. That's nearly 25% of their work time consumed by tasks that could be streamlined or automated with the right tools.

Enter Design Thinking

Design thinking flips traditional tool development on its head: it starts with empathy, not policy. This human-centered approach to innovation ensures we create tools people actually want to use—not just tools they have to use.

The IDEO Design Thinking framework provides a perfect roadmap for developing people management solutions that resonate with real managers facing real challenges:

1. Empathise

The journey begins by deeply understanding managers' day-to-day challenges:

• How do they track who's doing great work?

• How do they prepare for one-on-ones when they've had back-to-back meetings all week?

• How do they identify burnout risks or promotion candidates?

• What do they dread when performance reviews come around?

By observing actual behaviors and pain points, we can spot the scattered spreadsheets, notes in various places, and clunky HR systems that weren't designed with managers in mind.

2. Define

With insights gathered, we can articulate a clear problem statement:

"Managers lack a smart, responsive, real-time way to understand, support, and develop their people. The consequences are missed signals, poor attention allocation, and burnout."

From here, we can ask: "How might we design an intelligent real-time tool that helps managers lead better by surfacing the right insights at the right time in the flow of work?"

3. Ideate

Now comes the creative part. Instead of building another static dashboard or checklist, what if we created a manager's co-pilot—a conversational assistant that managers can turn to at any moment?

Imagine a tool where managers could simply ask:

• "What should I know before my one-to-one with Alex?"

• "Who in my team is most at risk of burnout?"

• "What skill gaps are emerging across my team?"

• "Can you summarise our last three performance check-ins?"

This AI-powered co-pilot would respond in real time, drawing from performance history, sentiment trends, calendars, and feedback tools. It would even track skills development in real time, offering nudges, coaching tips, and suggested actions.

4. Prototype

The prototype wouldn't look like a traditional HR system. It would feature:

• A clean, chat-style interface

• Context awareness (connected to team goals, performance cycles)

• Always-on learning capabilities

• Integration with existing sources (feedback systems, check-ins, calendars, team tools)

Early prototypes might include preset prompts like:

• Summarise team sentiment this week

• Identify potential successors for this role

• Flag inconsistencies in evaluations across the department

5. Test

The final step involves getting the tool into managers' hands and gathering actionable feedback:

• Did this save you time before your meeting?

• Did it change how you coached someone this week?

• Did you spot something you wouldn't have noticed otherwise?

Testing would be iterative—keeping feedback loops short, adapting language to match managers' tone, stripping out anything that feels too formal or "HR-ish," and ensuring the tool is genuinely useful, not just technically impressive.

Real-World Application

Solutions like MoveUp are already pioneering this approach, helping managers prepare for meetings more efficiently, embedding consistent skills frameworks to remove bias, and offering structured feedback collection and performance signals.

What makes these next-generation tools different is they're designed for managers first—a rarity in HR tech. They prioritise:

• Replacing manual review processes with real-time insights

• Helping managers prepare for meetings faster and more confidently

• Embedding consistent frameworks to reduce bias

• Offering structured feedback collection and performance signals

  
  

Moving Forward

If we want to revolutionise people management, we need to shift from reactive administration to proactive, intelligent leadership tools. Managers don't need more tasks, checklists, manual spreadsheets, and dashboards—they need smarter support tools that:

• Think alongside them

• Spot what they might miss

• Help them lead with confidence

• Save precious time otherwise spent gathering information

With the right intent, design approach, and AI integration, we can build the co-pilot that every manager deserves—transforming how teams are led and making management both more human and more effective.

At HRThrive, we specialise in bringing design thinking to HR processes and tools. Want to learn how your organisation can develop people management solutions your managers will actually love? Contact us to start the conversation.