hr tech platform for employees
i accidentally discovered product management 😇
the challenge
in 2018, reliance industries ltd., india’s largest publicly listed company was undergoing a major hr transformation under the banner of HR 2.0. with a workforce exceeding 500,000 employees across energy, retail, telecom, and media, the challenge was clear: how to reimagine the employee lifecycle (“hire to retire”) with a digital-first philosophy that could keep pace with reliance’s scale and ambition.
the mandate from leadership, guided by the chairman and executive council was to design futuristic, benchmarked HR experiences that improved engagement, broke silos, and enabled “future of hr” for reliance group companies.
the solution
the solution took shape as reliance communities, an yammer-inspired internal social and engagement platform. The platform aimed to bring together employees across divisions through:
- personalised feeds powered by a custom algorithm that weighted posts by who posted, engagement (likes/comments), content format (image/video), and user-defined interests.
- gamification-first design, deeply inspired by octalysis framework from Yu-Kai-Chou’s actionable gamification (2014), moving beyond points and badges to create intrinsic motivation through streaks, achievements, and reputation markers.
- human-centric design principles that made the experience intuitive and delightful, even at scale.
- chatbots and workflow automations to streamline common employee actions and hr queries.
the outcome
- adoption at scale: reliance communities served as a central engagement layer for thousands of employees across business units.
- boosted engagement: gamification design and feed personalisation encouraged more consistent participation compared to traditional static portals.
- strategic alignment: the project became a flagship initiative within HR 2.0, showcasing how ai, automation, and human-centric design could co-create next-gen hr practices.
the learnings
for me personally, it was a chance to build at a massive scale while balancing global benchmarks with contextual realities, and create an employee-first solution. also i accidentally discovered product management 😎