Unmaze helps organizations redesign how work actually works.
We partner with Founders, CEOs, and Chief People Officers at critical inflection points – moments when growth, disruption, or change demand new ways of working.
Capital raises, scaling, acquisitions, and business model shifts create both risk and opportunity. How work is designed determines which one wins.
We blend Fortune 100 and startup operator experience with evidence-based methods to redesign work, leadership, and people practices – helping organizations scale, sharpen capabilities, and thrive through their next chapter.
Every organization lives its own version of the maze
Whether you’re scaling fast or navigating complexity, Unmaze meets you where you are, using human-centered, evidence-based design to clear the path to clarity, performance, and meaning.
How might we design organizations that are simpler, more human, and truly outcome-driven?
From fast-scaling startups to complex enterprises, the challenge is aligning purpose, people, and priorities so motion becomes outcomes.
How might we help leaders and systems evolve intentionally?
Leaders face unprecedented pressure and paradoxes, so alignment often comes less from intent than overwhelm. Unmaze helps them build on strengths and purpose to lead with agency and care, enabling conscious, human, sustainable transformation.
Our Solutions
We partner with organizations at key inflection points: moments when growth, complexity, or transformation signal that it’s time to design work intentionally.
Scaling Fast & Designing for Growth
Startups move fast, but clarity, culture, and coherence often lag. We help founders design the backbone for intentional, sustainable scale.
- Vision, culture, and people
- Talent Development & Compensation Frameworks
- Hiring talent with intention and speed
Sharpening Capabilities for Future Readiness
As organizations grow, early systems hit their limits. We help strengthen leadership, culture, and ways of working to prepare for what’s next.
- AI integration
- Organizational design
- Integrated Talent Practices
- Ways of working
Leadership, Executive & Team Coaching
We support leaders and teams in growing with intention and relatedness, turning change into meaningful, sustained transformation.
- Executive coaching
- Team coaching and facilitation
- Leadership development journeys
- Cross-cultural transitions
Meet Us
We are operators, coaches, and organizational practitioners dedicated to redesigning how work works, bringing deep experience across industries, geographies, and stages of growth.
Thiago Licias de Oliveira
Founder of Unmaze
Global People & Culture leader integrating design, organizational science, and human insight so people and performance thrive together. He brings over 20 years of experience across Fortune 100 companies, high-growth startups, and mission-driven organizations, with senior roles at Lucent Technologies, Avaya, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Johnson & Johnson.
Alysia Bullock
Alysia Bullock is a strategic HR advisor and leadership coach with 25+ years of experience partnering with leaders to build inclusive cultures, strengthen leader and team effectiveness, and drive meaningful change. She brings deep expertise across pharmaceutical, biotech, and mission-driven organizations.
Elaina Gillule
Elaina Gillule is an organizational development and executive coach who helps leaders and teams navigate complex change, lead transformation, and strengthen collaboration at critical moments. She brings 25+ years of experience driving enterprise-level change across biopharma, medical device, and consumer organizations.
Jane Shlaes, MS, PCC
Leadership coach and talent advisor who helps leaders and organizations lead through change, strengthen leadership capability, and navigate complexity to create clear, confident, and aligned action, particularly in healthcare, association, and life sciences environments.
Our Cases
Scaling Fast & Designing for Growth
Building a Scalable Talent Practice for a Tech Startup
Signature Insight: Scaling sticks when purpose and structure evolve together.
Impact:
- Scaled through IPO while doubling org size
- Industry-benchmark engagement and retention were maintained during rapid growth
- Energy renewal, with a significant decrease in burnout and absences across the organization.
Client Situation: A mission-driven tech startup needing help with how to scale fast for IPO without losing its culture.
The Unmaze Way
Sense: Heard voices across the company mapping strengths, bottlenecks, and growth risks, and culture tensions in a remote-first context.
Design: Co-created talent development and compensation philosophies to align the leadership on a unique way to manage talent in support of the intended culture and unprecedented high growth rates. Designed an innovative framework to evolve ways of working, focusing on three pillars: intentional human relatedness & connection, performance & renewal sprints, and team collaboration flourishing.
Unmaze: Ran human design sprints and rituals to reinforce the evolved culture and expectations.
Sustain: Embedded quarterly learning loops and lightweight culture metrics.
Capability Reinvention for Specialty Growth
Signature Insight: Capabilities are the strategy in motion.
Impact:
- Revenues doubled over the period
- Market rank improved 11th → 2nd
- +15% boost in pipeline availability/readiness
Client Situation: A regional pharma shifting from primary care to innovative specialty care, needing new scientific and commercial capabilities.
The Unmaze Way
Sense: Diagnosed capability gaps against the growth thesis, and identified key shifts needed in terms of workforce, org design, capabilities, and ways of working.
Design: Blended buy/build strategy for critical roles and new go-to-market structures.
Unmaze: Launched role profiles, learning pathways, and mobility plans tied to outcomes.
Sustain: Tracked capability and pipeline metrics linked to market performance.
SHARPENING CAPABILITIES FOR FUTURE
Connecting Talent Practices to the Business Value Creation Agenda
Signature Insight: When talent mirrors value, performance compounds.
Impact:
- 150 top leader roles identified as driving ~80% of value, with a clear mandate of what was expected to translate strategy into successful execution
- Two-thirds of top roles upgraded within the next 2-3 years with a build/buy strategy
- Bench quality/readiness up (double-digit gains across leadership competencies)
Client Situation: A Fortune 50 enterprise needing to improve and sustain performance and market leadership while realizing it didn’t have the leadership, org design, and cultural enablers to achieve its growth aspirations.
The Unmaze Way
Sense: Explored the key business drivers generating disproportionate growth and deeply assessed the human factors behind superior performance.
Design: An integrated framework for linking strategy → roles & capabilities → assessment → leadership deployment & talent investments to an action plan for value creation
Unmaze: Piloted across businesses, activating leaders to own their role and successor moves.
Sustain: Baked into the annual talent rhythm and “Talent Story” governance.
Culture Integration & Leadership Reset
Signature Insight: Integration works when culture design leads structural change.
Impact:
- Engagement +22 points in one year
- 80% of leadership roles were refreshed to fit the new mandate
- 100% succession readiness for top roles
Client Situation: A med-device business integrating two large competitors into one single company and needing a shared identity and new ways of working.
The Unmaze Way
Sense: Surfaced misalignments in culture, accountability, and team effectiveness.
Design: Co-created the leadership model, culture narrative, and engagement rituals.
Unmaze: Facilitated leader journeys and team alignment across regions.
Sustain: Established pulse checks, coaching, and peer learning to lock behaviors.
Leadership Architecture & Succession
Signature Insight: Succession pipeline health & readiness are designed, not discovered.
Impact:
- Accelerated the top 60 next-gen leaders with intentional development plans, investment required, and visibility across the enterprise
- 70% of the cohort had 1-2 developmental moves in the first two years of the program, with a 95% retention rate
- Succession bench strength for critical roles increased by 15 pp
Client Situation: A Fortune 50 enterprise seeking consistent readiness and mobility for its most senior roles in a context of significant business change & technological disruptions.
The Unmaze Way
Sense: Identified key role requirement shifts for the future and translated them into requirements as skills, experiences, and leadership traits most critical to success. An estimated supply-and-demand analysis of the most significant leadership gaps was conducted.
Design: Built a unified leadership architecture with assessments, acceleration paths, and development plans.
Unmaze: Activated Next-Gen pools and targeted rotations to close readiness gaps across a select group of future-ready leaders globally.
Sustain: Installed cadence, dashboards, and leader accountability for moves and development investments.
A laboratory of ideas and discovery, exploring how people and performance find their way to work that works.
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