Unretirement

Data Visualisation · User Research · Harvard · 2023

Mixed MethodsUser ResearchJourney MappingData VisualisationOpportunity Sizing

The problem

Between 2020 and 2023, the number of Americans returning to work after retirement grew significantly - driven by meaning and identity as much as economic pressure. Yet every major employment platform treats them identically to a 28-year-old first job-seeker. The friction is designed in.

3

distinct user archetypes identified

Mixed

quantitative and qualitative methods

JTBD

framework applied at each re-entry stage

Harvard

graduate research project

The insight

Retirees returning to work aren't a niche edge case. They're a signal that employment products have failed to design for the full arc of a working life.

My approach

The research combined labour market data analysis with qualitative interviews across three distinct returning-worker archetypes: the financially-driven, the identity-driven, and the opportunity-driven. Each had entirely different jobs-to-be-done at each stage of re-entry, and none of them were being served by existing platforms.

The output was not a research report. It was a product opportunity framework: three defined segments, their unmet needs mapped against re-entry stages, and prioritised intervention points where a product could reduce friction. The data visualisation below was built to communicate those findings in a form that a product team could act on directly.

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