Designing a McKinsey tradition
How keep spirits high? Make gratitude contagious with an annual week-long Thank-a-thon that generates tens of thousands of thank you messages and hundreds of thousands of page views across the globe.
In 2018 while on McKinsey's Global Internal Comms team, essentially an internal creative agency for the Managing Partner and senior firm leadership, we were tasked with creating an initiative to respond to some internal research on the benefits of workplace gratitude. My idea was a horizontally scrolling Thank You card “wall” that I called Thank-a-thon, the idea stuck and has been an annual firm tradition ever since.
The idea that made it stick wasn't the wall itself though, it was the notification loop I designed around it, where being publicly thanked triggered charming notifications that prompted colleagues to pay it forward, driving a viral flood of new messages every cycle for years afterward.
McKinsey has since cited Thank-a-thon publicly as one of five practices behind its 2025 Best Employers Award for well-being, with a Wall of Gratitude that's grown to more than 65,000 notes in one event.
As UX & Tech Lead for the initiative, I researched and built the technical support model needed to run it, assembling and leading a team of just under 150 technical and engineering colleagues each year, and led the platform's modernization from jQuery to React, deliberately keeping the visual design consistent to protect years of built-up brand recognition. Over time I added features like a library of animated card designs and office-based sorting, and led the most recent firmwide relaunch in December 2025, including a live promotional ticker called Thank-o-meter that gave the site a dynamic presence on McKinsey's intranet homepage.
