Idam Adam

Idam Adam

Lead Product Designer atCulture Amp

I design intelligent and thoughtful software that makes complex, high-stakes problems feel simple.

I bridge design and engineering through prototyping directly in code and helping other designers to do the same.

I've shaped product direction for AI features, platform strategy, and multilingual expansion. I lead through craft and by creating high-trust environments where high standards and psychological safety amplify each other.

Design approach

01

I don’t stop at the user problem

I dig into the tech, the data, and the business context. That breadth has helped me expand project scope, challenge assumptions, and find opportunities others miss.

02

I design in the material of software

I prototype in code so I can interact with my ideas and feel how they work. It means I speak engineers’ language and understand constraints early.

03

I build trust so people challenge my thinking

The best work comes from psychological safety. I invest in relationships so my teams feel comfortable pushing back, sparring openly, and arriving at better answers together.

Selected work

AI & Intelligence
Highlights and Opportunities

AI summaries to make performance reviews easier

Managers spent hours synthesizing feedback each review cycle. I reframed AI-generated themes into Highlights & Opportunities to match how managers actually evaluate performance, and worked with data science to tune prompts so output cited specific projects instead of generic summaries. The feature launched to a 93% positive feedback rating.

Loading highlights and opportunities

AI Suggest Improvements

AI suggestions to help managers write better feedback

We saw AI assistance as a natural fit for making feedback better, but didn't want AI to take over critical thinking. Working with People Scientists, I designed suggestions around principles of good feedback so managers learned over time rather than offloading to an LLM. After launch, 80% of managers improved their feedback after using it.

Alex Johnson has made some progress, but it's not really enough. They still have a long way to go. Their performance hasn't improved much, and they haven't met their goals in a meaningful way. They should try to be better next review period.

auto_awesomeLooking for ways to improve...
Platform & Systems
Multilingual Performance Cycles

A simple workflow to run a multilingual performance cycle

Lack of support for multilingual workflows was a top reason for lost deals. Through research with admins, I discovered they were already using machine translation and managing via spreadsheets. I advocated to expand scope beyond a basic form to include both. The result was simpler than existing flows, and customers started requesting it in other areas of the product.

Comment cette personne a-t-elle performé au cours de cette période d'évaluation?

English (English US)

How did this person perform during this review period?

Quels progrès ont été réalisés vers leurs objectifs?

English (English US)

What progress was made toward their goals?

Home Connect

A unified homepage for Culture Amp organised around people

Managers were missing signals about their direct reports. Goals going stale, feedback sitting unread. The team was building a feature dashboard, but I pushed for a different direction and ran an experiment to prove it out. Managers who used the new homepage were 255% more likely to schedule their first 1-on-1.

Culture Amp

Home

Upcoming

2023 Performance Cycle feedback closes in 3 days

2 of 5

Direct reports with completed nominations

MW
MN
AP
JR
Malik Williams, Maya Nguyen and 3 others have not submitted their nominations
AP
Aisha Patel1-on-1 today

To discuss

Wellbeing has gone down since the last 1-on-1
AP
No topics from Aisha
CJ
1 topic from you
Recent
MW
Malik John Williamshas an inactive goal
25%

Learn how to handle multiple priorities

On track
•Updated just now•Due Dec 31, 2023
Design Sandbox

Built an internal repository to make AI prototyping faster and easier

Designers had no way to deploy or share AI prototypes. I built the infrastructure myself and designed onboarding so anyone could start with a single slash command. 15 designers and PMs adopted it, and one team used it to prototype with real survey data for executive demos that got a major release funded.

Design Sandbox

Culture Amp

SC

Sarah Chen

Designer

MJ

Marcus Johnson

Designer

PP

Priya Patel

Designer

AK

Alex Kim

Designer

JR

Jordan Rivera

Designer

TB

Taylor Brooks

Designer

claude-code
~/.../sandbox
Try a command:
opus 4.5ready
Exploration
Personal Exploration

Building my own web-based prototyping tool

A personal project to make complex prototyping via a coding agent more accessible via a web interface.

  • Give it an idea, it builds a prototype with versioning and a "scrubber" to help you understand what's contained in the prototype.
  • Figured out how to bring a coding agent CLI into a browser. Designed interactions around that behavior.
  • This is how I learned to build the Design Sandbox at work. Personal project was the proving ground.
  • I can design and build. I've developed deep fluency using these tools from this experience.
Vignette Demo
Desktop
Type a command...