Designing governed workspaces with visible access, provenance, and sync state

At Kenley, I led the design of Workspaces: the shared project layer beneath Chat and Workflows. Chat is where users search project knowledge, asked questions, and perform actions against it. Workflows turns a team’s way of working into a reusable sequence.

This epic brought both together with workspace creation, access scope, external knowledge, and sync recovery so teams could understand what information Kenley was using (and whether it was current).

Workspaces brought source material, collaboration, and AI workflows into one governed project space.

My role

• Defined the Workspace product strategy through ongoing research with enterprise consulting customers.
• Designed the end-to-end experience across workspace creation, source connection, knowledge management, sharing, and sync recovery.
• Translated source-system, access, compliance, and data-currency constraints into product behavior that teams could understand.

Product impact

• Alongside Workflows, Workspaces contributed to onboarding three enterprise customers and a seven-figure increase in annual recurring revenue.
• Across one enterprise deployment, users ingested [X files] across [Y folders] from connected SharePoint and Google Drive sources. These figures exclude files added through manual uploads.
• Existing customers created/joined a median of 15 collaborative workspaces per user within three months of launch, with a peak of 50+.
• The experience established role-based access, GDPR, and accessibility as baseline product constraints rather than administrative afterthoughts.

At a glance

Kenley helps consulting teams work with large bodies of source material through Chat and Workflows. In Chat, users search prior work, ask questions, and perform actions; Workflows turns repeatable tasks into runnable processes. Both depend on the quality of the knowledge beneath them.

Historical material could already be ingested and queried through Chat. Live project work was harder: it remained distributed across SharePoint and other sources, changed throughout an engagement, and was shared with different groups of people.

The design challenge was therefore not simply to create another place to store files. It was to give teams a shared project space whose contents, access boundaries, and current state they could understand.

[SharePoint]   [Google Drive]   [Manual uploads]
      \              |               /
       +-------------+--------------+
                     |
                     v
         +-------------------------+
         |       WORKSPACE         |
         |-------------------------|
         | Audience and access     |
         | Connected knowledge     |
         | Sync and failure state  |
         +------------+------------+
                      |
          +-----------+-----------+
          |                       |
          v                       v
        [Chat]                [Workflows]
          \                       /
           +----------+----------+
                      |
                      v
[Generated artifacts (e.g PowerPoint, Word, Excel)]

Static imports hid stale knowledge

Consulting teams rarely begin with a blank workspace. They inherit client folders, internal precedents, uploaded files, and material that continues to change as the work progresses.