Internal Systems, Enablement, and a Proprietary Stack

The through-line

Over eight years and three engagements, my work at ExxonMobil kept returning to the same problem in different forms: a new internal team exists, it has something valuable, and the rest of the organization does not know about it or cannot use it.

The deliverables varied enormously: websites, video, presentations, trade show booths, brand systems. The job underneath them did not change.

Learning the stack

My first engagement was with the Data team, when data was new at Exxon and the group was still establishing itself internally. I built their sites, their marketing, their trade show presence, and their graphics components.

The more consequential thing I did was learn ExxonMobil's proprietary internal markup language. Exxon does not use standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for internal systems. They use an in-house language that gives them full control over their internal software. Learning it was a substantial lift, and it changed what I could do there permanently. I stopped being a designer who handed work to developers and became one who could build inside their stack.

That capability is the reason every subsequent engagement happened.

Planning & Decision Technology

I returned in 2022 as Senior Creative Designer for Planning & Decision Technology, a business-side group studying the science of organizational decision-making, formed in response to a real need to understand why certain decisions had gone badly.

They were new, and they had the same problem the Data team had: a methodology nobody had heard of. My work was internal marketing in the broadest sense: building the team's site, its brand, its presentation materials, its trade show presence, and a body of explainer video work translating decision science into something upper management could actually apply.

Right Concept

Right Concept was PDT's strategy framework, a system for helping the business and upper management work through a decision process rigorously rather than intuitively.

It was my primary focus. I built the website, the graphics, the presentation materials, the customer-facing marketing, and a series of explainer videos on the underlying concepts. The work was translation: taking a rigorous and genuinely difficult methodology and making it comprehensible to the people who needed to use it.

Breeze

Breeze is the piece I am most fond of, and it happened entirely outside any formal brief.

By 2022 the proprietary language had grown from simple markup into a full packaging system, and internal developers were building distributable packages against it, letting teams ship internal software without waiting on the central development group.

I had a relationship with one of those developers from my first engagement, built on the fact that I could actually read and write the language. PDT's requests were becoming more technically ambitious than I could deliver alone, so I asked for his help. In exchange, I built the marketing and instructional platform for his package.

That package was Breeze. He got adoption. I got the technical capability I needed for PDT. Neither of us went through a formal channel, and it shipped fast.

It is a small story, but it is the truest one I have about how work actually gets done inside a large organization.

The 2020 engagement

A short, focused promotional marketing engagement, brought back specifically because I could design and build in the proprietary language without a developer.