General Electric

Context

The Situation

GE's MyTech platform was the internal system used across the entire company for the IT asset lifecycle: ordering hardware and software, tracking what you have, managing approvals, and getting technical support. It served everyone from a new hire requesting their first laptop to a plant manager overseeing 500 desktop computers and the software licenses running on them.

When GE's work-from-home transition exposed the platform's limitations, leadership saw an opportunity: make MyTech good enough to sell externally as an enterprise product. Baker Hughes, a major GE partner in the industrial sector, was the target first customer.

The challenge was not just improving individual pages. It was bringing an entire platform to commercial grade: reliable enough, intuitive enough, and consistent enough that an external enterprise would pay for it and trust it to run their own operations.

MyTech Dashboard

MyTech personalized homepage showing approvals, orders, incidents, and quick actions

The redesigned MyTech homepage gave every user a personalized entry point: pending approvals, open orders, active incidents, and quick actions for managers who needed to order or search on behalf of their teams.

Decisions

Key Decisions Made

1

Establish a Design Process for a Team That Had Never Had One

The product team was newly formed with no design methodology. Built a structured design sprint framework with five phases: discover, define, create, test, develop. Each phase had clear roles for PM, UX, UI, and engineering, with defined handoff points and decision gates. This gave the team a repeatable process for shipping quality work instead of ad hoc reactions to stakeholder requests.
2

Redesign the Full Asset Lifecycle, Not Individual Pages

The initial ask was to fix the Get Support page. Rejected the piecemeal approach. Instead, treated the platform as a connected system: homepage, catalogs, ordering, approvals, and support all had to work as a coherent experience. The plant manager overseeing 500 desktops and the new hire ordering their first laptop needed the same system to feel intuitive. Disconnected page-by-page fixes would have left the platform feeling fractured, especially to external customers evaluating it for commercial use.
3

Prioritize Self-Service to Reduce Support Dependency

The helpdesk was a bottleneck. Every minor IT question generated a support ticket that consumed human resources. Redesigned Get Support around searchable categories, a language switcher for GE's global workforce, and clear pathways to frequently accessed services. The goal was to make the first instinct "search for it" instead of "call someone." This directly drove the 14% helpdesk reduction.
4

Build and Launch the Platform's First Design System

Commercialization required consistency at scale. Internal tools can tolerate inconsistency between pages because employees learn to work around it. External customers will not. Built the platform's first design system and deployed it globally across the GE ecosystem, creating a shared component library and interaction patterns that eliminated the visual and behavioral inconsistency that made MyTech feel like an internal tool rather than a commercial product.

Self-Service Support

MyTech Get Support page with search, categories, and help options

The redesigned Get Support experience organized IT help into searchable categories with language switching for GE's global workforce. Service Desk, MyTech Lounge, and District Partner options gave users multiple support pathways before submitting a ticket.

Outcomes

What We Delivered

✓

Baker Hughes Integrated

First external enterprise customer successfully onboarded, proving commercial viability of the platform

↑

20% NPS Improvement

Measurable lift in user satisfaction across the platform

↓

14% Helpdesk Reduction

Self-service redesign reduced support ticket dependency

⚙

Design System Launched

First design system deployed globally across the GE ecosystem

Lessons

What I Learned

Internal-to-commercial is a design quality problem. The features did not change dramatically. What changed was the tolerance for friction. External customers exposed every rough edge that internal users had learned to work around. Raising the quality bar for one customer raised it for everyone, and the design system was the mechanism that made that sustainable.

What I'd Do Differently

I would have embedded more deeply with the service desk team earlier. They were fielding hundreds of calls a day and had a direct line to every friction point on the platform. Instead of relying primarily on usability testing and stakeholder interviews, I would have used call logs, common ticket categories, and service desk employee insights as the primary input for prioritization. The people answering the phones already knew what was broken.

The Situation

Key Decisions Made

Establish a Design Process for a Team That Had Never Had One

Redesign the Full Asset Lifecycle, Not Individual Pages

Prioritize Self-Service to Reduce Support Dependency

Build and Launch the Platform's First Design System

What We Delivered

What I Learned

What I'd Do Differently

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