The brief was wrong
That's where the interesting work started

The assumption that would have failed

The client needed to save time

Hundreds of relocations a year: the same meetings, the same information, and the same hours being burned by a small HR team doing things that didn't need a human

The obvious answer was a static site with a few videos

Efficient. Tidy. Done

The obvious answer would have failed

Professionals relocating internationally don't engage with tools that feel built for HR's convenience. They engage with things that feel built for them. Something that looks like it was made to save time gets treated like something made to save time: skimmed, ignored, abandoned

Relocating to a new country is already full of uncertainty and generic content doesn’t reduce this

The real brief wasn't ‘build an onboarding tool’
It was ‘build something so good that time-poor executives choose to use it’

The adventure book idea

Splitting content by role felt like the next move. But that still meant clicking ‘Project Manager’ and watching your assigned content

Functional, but dry

What if onboarding worked more like a choose-your-own-adventure book?

Not a menu, not a category, but a journey that felt personal because it reflected your situation, without asking you to define it yourself

That idea exploded the scope almost immediately. Mapping every possible path through the experience revealed nearly 80 unique journeys. Each one with its own logic, its own overlaps, its own edge cases

This was going to be bigger than anyone had planned for

The constraints that shaped everything

This had potential far beyond the original brief: a global solution that could scale across the business

Different teams started seeing different possibilities

Which meant nothing could be baked in. Legal and financial content changes. Regional policies vary. Voiceovers needed to flex without reshooting everything

AI-generated voiceovers made the content modular and maintainable. Every piece of the system was designed to be swapped, updated, and scaled without rebuilding from scratch

Then IT security nearly killed it

The product didn't belong anywhere. It couldn't sit behind authentication as the infrastructure wasn't there. But it couldn't be open either. A casually curious internal user stumbling across it would undermine everything

The answer came late one night, from an unexpected place: a Google ad. Looking at the URL, something clicked

The URL could be the key

The solution nobody expected

If the personalisation lived in the link rather than the system, there was nothing to protect. No personal data in the platform. No login to compromise. Without the custom URL, the tool showed nothing, because there was nothing to show

Despite delivering fully personalised content to each user, the system contained no personal information. It was essentially invisible without the right link

HR could generate a custom URL in seconds with just a few details entered into an admin panel. Then a link could be sent and a personalised journey unlocked

The operational lift that threatened to undo the whole point of the project was reduced to almost nothing

IT approved it

The payoff

2,000+ hours saved in the first year

The equivalent of a full-time role, freed from repetitive coordination and given back to work that actually needed a human

79 unique journeys. One system

Every person relocating received something that felt made for them, not processed by a department

100% positive feedback from users across every office

But the best moment came later, in a conversation with the client who'd commissioned it

She wasn't just satisfied with the numbers, she was proud

A tool built to solve an internal admin problem had quietly become something nobody else in the sector had thought to build