The right expert might sit three time zones away — and you may never know they exist. I designed an internal network that gives colleagues a simple reason, format and time box to start useful conversations across borders.
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Tokio Marine Holdings brings together thousands of employees with highly specialized knowledge across markets. The opportunity was to design a shared digital space where a colleague could discover who knows what, request guidance and learn directly from someone working in another cultural and operational context.
The Group had valuable knowledge distributed across offices worldwide, but employees had no simple way to find the right colleague, understand their expertise or begin a meaningful conversation. Time zones, language, organizational silos and the formality of traditional networking made cross-border exchange harder than it needed to be.
The Talent Network turns skills, interests and availability into approachable connection points. Its central experience, Coffee Talk, matches colleagues from different countries for a focused 30-minute video conversation about methods, processes and emerging technologies. Expert mentoring, searchable profiles, messaging and a knowledge hub extend each conversation into an ongoing professional network.
The concept made expertise easier to discover without turning work into another noisy social feed. Coffee Talk gave each connection a purpose and a respectful 30-minute format. Adoption metrics were not available, so the outcome is framed around validated scenarios and product potential.
I started by listening for the moments where the experience stopped making sense.
Stakeholder workshops, interviews with employees from different regions, internal-network journey mapping, concept testing and comparative analysis of professional communities and mentoring platforms.
Employees were interested in cross-border learning, but an open-ended invitation to network felt vague and time-consuming. A short conversation with a clear topic, duration and mutual expectation felt useful, safe and easy to accept.
Use a structured 30-minute Coffee Talk as the smallest meaningful unit of global knowledge exchange, then support deeper relationships through messaging, mentoring and continued discovery.
Every meeting has a visible topic, a fixed 30-minute duration and calendar-aware scheduling. This turns networking into a manageable learning moment with a clear reason for both people to participate.
Search, skill filters, location and match indicators help employees find colleagues by what they can learn together, while profiles provide enough context to start a thoughtful conversation.
The platform prioritizes availability, expertise and direct exchange instead of public popularity metrics, infinite feeds or performative engagement.
Profiles, connection requests, messaging, mentoring, scheduling and video rooms work as one flow, reducing the friction of moving between disconnected corporate tools.
The end-to-end prototype was evaluated through scenarios covering expert discovery, profile comparison, Coffee Talk scheduling and follow-up messaging. Iterations clarified the difference between connections and mentoring, made time-zone information more prominent and added stronger context before sending a meeting request.
Global connection works best when the product removes the uncertainty around why to meet, what to discuss and how much time it will take. The strongest design move was not adding more social features, but creating a respectful structure for useful human exchange. A next phase would measure match quality, repeat conversations and knowledge transfer across regions over time.