Emirates NBD

Monday the brief. Friday the product.

How a one-week design sprint took Talent & L&D from an outdated SharePoint mentorship site and a large, ambiguous BRD to a live coded prototype - and a single end-to-end journey the business could walk.

A laptop mockup of Talent Connect sign-in: Sign in with SSO on the left, and a navy panel on the right with mentor portraits and the line The experience you need is already inside the bank.
The Talent Connect mentee dashboard on a phone: Welcome back, Noura Al-Ketbi. Upcoming sessions, development objectives, and a Find a Mentor button.

Details

Company
Emirates NBD · Talent & L&D
Programme
Talent Connect
Period
3–7 August 2026
Role
Lead designer, concept to deployed prototype

At a glance

The headline outcome of the Talent Connect sprint - a business team that arrived with a large requirements document and left able to walk one specific product.

  • 5 days

    Brief to product

    A working, password-protected prototype by Friday. Stakeholders opened it on their own laptops, tablets, and phones.

  • BRD → 1 journey

    Ambiguity → A path

    A large requirements document narrowed to three roles and one walkable path: invite, book, meet, report.

  • 1 artifact

    The review was the product

    The business signed off by walking the prototype. Not a deck. Not the BRD Word file.

The brief

Mentoring programme lived on a SharePoint site that had grown old: hard to use, off the quality bar the bank applies to everything else, and no way to show whether the programme was working.

Talent & L&D had written a business requirements document for a replacement. The document was large. It described a platform. It could not settle the product: who becomes a mentor, what a session is, how a mentee finds someone, how the programme evidences itself to the business.

Yousef Karaman, Head of Learning & Development, asked for a mentoring platform staff would actually use - colleagues booking 45 minutes with colleagues who had already done the work.

The unstated second brief was mine. A BRD that size is a list of possible products. You cannot get a business team to pick one from a Word file. They need to walk a journey and feel where it breaks.

Laptop mockup of Find a Mentor: a search field and skill filters above mentor cards with the next open slot and a View profile button.
Laptop mockup of the original SharePoint mentorship site, Pick My Brain: mentor cards on the left and a meetings calendar on the right.
Talent Connect: the SharePoint mentorship site and the sprint prototype.
Laptop mockup of the original SharePoint mentorship site, Pick My Brain: mentor cards on the left and a meetings calendar on the right.

Before

  • Hard to use; off the quality bar the bank applies to everything else.
  • No way to see whether the mentoring programme was working.
  • The review artifact was a large Word-file BRD.

Business review

The SharePoint site and a Word-file BRD

Original SharePoint · mock data, not real figures.

Laptop mockup of Find a Mentor: a search field and skill filters above mentor cards with the next open slot and a View profile button.

After

  • Three roles, one path: invite, book, meet, report.
  • Stakeholders walked the running prototype on desktop, tablet, and phones.
  • A large BRD narrowed to a journey the business could agree on, cut, or keep.

Business review

The running product - a 17-step walk from invite to report

Sprint prototype · mock data, not real figures.

Approach

We spent the week deleting options, not adding screens. One coded prototype, three roles, one path the business could walk end to end.

  1. 01

    Working coded prototype from day one

  2. 02

    Three roles only - mentee, mentor, admin - cut from the BRD

  3. 03

    Deployed behind authentication for stakeholder self-serve preview on their own devices

  4. 04

    Live iteration with Talent & L&D against the running product, not against the document

  5. 05

    A 17-step guided journey from invite to report, plus the emails a demo usually skips

  6. 06

    Direct engineering handover from the reviewed codebase - React + shadcn, mapped 1:1

Results

The business agreed on a journey, not a document. That was the value of the week.

They stopped reviewing the BRD and started walking a specific journey: a mentee finding someone, a mentor arriving by invitation, an admin seeing whether the programme was alive. A large, ambiguous BRD document became a polished path they could agree on, cut, or keep.

The login put the product in their hands. The prototype was deployed behind authentication, so stakeholders opened the live product on their devices (desktop, tablet, phones) and followed the journey themselves. Feedback arrived against the running thing, not against a slide of it.

Preview Prototype

Concept, not the live programme · sample data.

Open
Laptop mockup of the Talent Connect admin dashboard: Platform Dashboard with public mentors, pending approvals, active mentees, sessions by status, and mentors by band.
Admin: Dashboard. Public mentors, pending approvals, active mentees, sessions by status.
Laptop mockup of Talent Connect Programme Reporting: sessions booked, average rating, mentees engaged, cancellation rate, sessions by month, and mentee satisfaction.
Admin: Reports. Sessions booked, ratings, mentees engaged, cancellation rate.
Laptop mockup of Find a Mentor: a search field and skill filters above mentor cards with the next open slot and a View profile button.
Mentee: Find a Mentor. Search, skill filters, next open slot on each card.
Laptop mockup of a mentor profile: Sara Al-Mansoori, open slots, and a Book a session panel.
Mentee: Mentor’s Profile. Skills, open slots, and the Book a session panel.
Laptop mockup of mentor Weekly Availability: a weekly slot grid with open times selected, plus cards for slots per week, bookings, and mentee capacity.
Mentor: Availability. Weekly 45-minute slot grid and mentee capacity.
Laptop mockup of mentor My Sessions: upcoming and completed sessions, ratings, and a list of mentee bookings with notes and feedback.
Mentor: My Sessions. Upcoming and completed sessions, notes, ratings.

What shipped, and what survived

What shipped is the sign-off artifact: a coded prototype covering mentee, mentor, and admin, with the first-run states and the emails a demo usually skips. Production is a rebuild in React, mapped 1:1 from the same artifact.

What survived is the journey. The BRD is no longer the product. The path the business walked on Friday is.

Personal testimonial from the Head of Learning & Development on the sprint and the clarity it produced.

- Name, Head of Learning & Development, Emirates NBD

If you need the product before you commit a budget, let’s talk.

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