Designing a learning ecosystem for sustained engagement
How we combined behavioral research, learning design and gamification to engage 100+ leaders throughout a seven-month development journey.
Domain
Discovery · Behavioral Research · Experience Strategy · Service Design · Gamification
My Role
Service Designer
Team
+5
Timeline
2021 · 7 months
Impact Overview
Scale
100+ leaders
Duration
7-month program
Engagement
~72%
Ambev, a Brazilian brewery under the Anheuser-Busch InBev umbrella, holds the title of the world’s biggest beer producer, dominating roughly 69% of Brazil’s market.
The company was moving its sales and distribution processes into a more digital model. Service Level leaders needed training to understand that shift and apply it to their work.
BEES Academy was a leadership development program created for Service Level leaders (GNS). The experience needed to remain relevant to participants with demanding routines, different learning preferences, and different reasons for taking part.
Short-term enthusiasm would not be enough: the program needed to create repeated reasons to return without making learning feel like another obligation.
Design Challenge
How might we sustain meaningful participation throughout a seven-month journey while accommodating different motivations and limited time?
I contributed across discovery and experience strategy, from research planning, interviews and synthesis to workshop facilitation, journey design and the behavioral and gamification model.
I worked with an HR consultant, a project manager and two members of Ambev’s Learning & Development HR team.
Ranking was the expected answer
Competition was already a strong part of Ambev’s culture. Leaders were familiar with visible performance, and ranking was presented to the team as a natural choice for the program’s gamification model.
Our research investigated whether that expectation could sustain participation over seven months. In the interviews, we explored what leaders valued in a development experience, which formats fit their routines and what made recognition meaningful to them.
We confirmed that ranking could motivate some participants. However the interviews also showed that competition did not work the same way for everyone. Some leaders were more interested in practical learning, recognition, development or the impact they could have on their teams. For them, ranking could reduce motivation instead of increasing it.
We noticed some common points in all conversations
Development preferences
Hands-on learning
Valuing the overall experience, not just individual moments
Quick and dynamic activities that fit into their busy routines
Strong geographic identification
Experience
Team-building moments
Applicable projects
Exchange with other areas of the company
Collaboration within the team
Immersion moments
Learning formats
Lectures
Videos
Training sessions
Tests and quizzes
Different Perspectives
We observed three different perspectives regarding how they approach problems and what motivates them.
Practical Vision
“As a true Ambev person, I love a good ranking!”
Manage problems and pain points practically and agilely in their day-to-day activities. They aim to keep problems from affecting results and performance.
Motivators
Competition → High
Recognition → rankings and rewards
Results-oriented
Critical Vision
“Sometimes I feel like people just want to come in first, but there’s no real outcome behind it.”
Take a more critical and detailed approach to the company's pain points, demanding faster solutions to the problems.
Motivators
Competition → Mid
Recognition → Visibillity
Development-oriented
Genuine appreciation
Curious Vision
“What really motivates me is seeing the impact I’m making on my team!”
Primarily includes who are newly appointed to the position. Their pain points were related to onboarding and adaptation process.
Motivators
Competition → High
Recognition → Ranking
Numbers-oriented
Ranking could create momentum without defining success
The initial ranking proposal made sense within Ambev. Leaders understood it, and visible performance was already part of the culture. The profiles showed that ranking appealed most strongly to results-oriented participants. Others responded better to genuine recognition, development, practical learning or the impact they could have on their teams.
We assigned each mechanic a distinct role so the system could respond to different motivations while keeping competition in the program.
Position in the ranking became one signal among several. The system also recognized what leaders learned, completed and contributed to the group.
Rankings
Made individual and team progress visible and created momentum.
Badges
Recognized completion milestones regardless of ranking position.
Ambassadors
Recognized influence, contribution and participation among peers.
Mystery boxes
Added anticipation through surprise and limited availability.
Reward marketplace
Turned accumulated points into choice and personally relevant rewards.
Individual and collective goals
Balanced personal performance with collaboration and team progress.
Research became a set of design criteria
The research translated into five criteria for the experience:
Fit demanding routines: keep activities quick and combine synchronous and asynchronous moments.
Make participation visible: use measurable activities so leaders could follow their progress.
Stay close to the work: connect activities to situations leaders faced in their routines.
Balance competition and collaboration: create momentum without making ranking the only path to recognition.
Offer choice and meaningful recognition: acknowledge what leaders accomplished during the course and in their work.
One journey, multiple ways to move forward
We organized BEES Academy as a sequence of themed learning cycles called “colmeias.” The journey began with the GNS role and leadership, then moved through business concepts, customer experience, tools and routines, strategy and career development.
Bloom’s Taxonomy structured each colmeia as a progression through six cognitive stages:
1. Build knowledge: remember and understand.
2. Apply at work: apply.
3. Solve a challenge: analyze, evaluate and create.
Leaders began with content sessions and short activities that introduced the subject and helped them understand it. They then applied that knowledge through tasks connected to their routines. A review consolidated the content before a final challenge asked them to analyze a situation, evaluate possible responses and create a practical proposal or solution.
Synchronous sessions gave leaders shared context and time for discussion. Asynchronous activities gave them room to participate around demanding schedules. A common system of progress, recognition and rewards connected both formats throughout the seven months.
Multiple mechanics, one behavioral strategy
The mechanics worked together across four moments of the experience:
Participation
Leaders earned points by attending sessions and completing activities and final challenges. Each task was weighted according to its relevance, difficulty and required effort.
Progress
Badges marked completion milestones within each colmeia, while individual and team rankings made progress visible.
Integration
Teams met, reviewed their shared progress and recognized ambassadors chosen by their peers for their influence and participation.
Recognition and choice
Mystery boxes rewarded ambassadors and created anticipation through surprise and limited availability. Other participants could spend accumulated points in a marketplace with limited vouchers and rewards.
Together, these moments connected personal progress to team performance and made participation and completed work visible beyond a participant’s position in the ranking.
Each interaction created a reason to return
The experience connected learning, action, feedback and recognition in a repeating cycle:
Learn → Participate → Progress → Receive feedback → Gain recognition → Return.
Rankings, badges and rewards helped participants understand progress, while new goals, contribution opportunities and marketplace choices created reasons to come back.
The program ran for seven months in 2021 and reached more than 100 leaders. It recorded approximately 72% engagement, measured by attendance at each activity.
The attendance measure showed whether leaders kept returning throughout the program. The qualitative feedback helped explain what supported that participation, especially the social energy of the sessions and the opportunity to meet colleagues across teams.
What participants said
Participants highlighted the energy of the closing session, the rotating groups, and the chance to meet colleagues they had previously known only through remote work.
What worked
“I had never taken part in such a fun closing session on Zoom. It changed my view of these HR sessions.”
“For me, as someone new here, it was good to meet the rest of the team and know who I was talking to on the other side.”
“The rotating groups and challenges were fun and gave us a chance to get to know people.”
What needed improvement
One participant asked for more interaction between teams:
“I missed having more interaction between the teams.”
Participation depended on how its parts worked together
Points and competition alone could not sustain engagement for seven months. The mechanics had to respond to different motivations and stay connected to the purpose of the program. Individual and collective progression opened more ways to participate. Linking learning with feedback, recognition, rewards and contribution gave leaders several reasons to return. Behavioral research identified those reasons, and service design turned them into a program that participants could follow and a multidisciplinary team could deliver.
Each Colmeia improved the next
Iteration was built into the program
The sequence of colmeias created a second feedback loop, this time for the design team. After each cycle, we reviewed participation and feedback, identified what needed to change and applied those adjustments to the next colmeia. The seven-month format gave us an agile cadence for improving the program while it was running.
Credits and responsibilities
Lucas | Service design contribution
Research: discovery, research planning, interviews, and behavioral synthesis.
Facilitation: workshops and multidisciplinary collaboration.
Experience strategy: journey design, behavioral model and gamification model.
Multidisciplinary team
1 HR consultant · 1 project manager · 2 Ambev Learning & Development HR team members
