OLA by LinkedIn
Industry Overview
LinkedIn is the world's leading professional networks, home to over a billion members and tens of thousands of employees working across global campuses. As the company navigated a return-to-office mandate, its Workplace team recognized a harder truth: getting things done at LinkedIn had become genuinely difficult.
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The Challenge
In an era where workplace experiences are increasingly fragmented, LinkedIn faced a critical challenge: employees were struggling with disconnected systems and inefficient processes that hindered their ability to be productive. OLA emerged as a personal system designed to support employees throughout their careers while fostering a deeper connection to LinkedIn's culture and values. With retention as its North Star metric, this unified workplace services app aims to reduce friction in workplace activities while amplifying unique LinkedIn experiences.
Our team conducted in-depth, user interviews across three LinkedIn campus buildings, observing employees as they ordered drinks, navigated to conference rooms, and and book conference rooms.
The Approach
We started where it mattered most - with the employees current daily experiences on campus. Through moderated interviews across LinkedIn's South Bay campuses, we mapped exactly where employees were losing time and getting stuck. What we kept hearing was that the problem was never about missing features. It was about an experience that made people work harder than they should have to. So we shifted the entire design direction away from a traditional service tool toward something that felt more like a proactive assistant, one that already knows what you need based on where you are in your day. That strategic reframe, from passive utility to contextual intelligence, was what drove daily habit formation, and ultimately the adoption and retention numbers the product delivered after launch.
The Results
OLA launched to 10,000 LinkedIn employees across the South Bay campuses and quickly became a fixture in the daily working rhythm of the people who used it.The numbers told one story. A 43% adoption rate. 69% user retention. More than 5,900 hours saved since launch.
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