Intro

Company: Remote, a leading HR tech company that enables businesses to hire, pay, and manage global talent.
Project period: March 2024 - Oct 2024
My role: Lead Product Designer
Tools: Figma, Dovetail, and Notion

Project overview:
Remote’s Global Payroll is a new product initiative that brought payroll visibility and automation into Remote’s SaaS platform. Before this project, customers relied entirely on Remote’s payroll specialists to answer questions and manually deliver reports. My design goal was to create a seamless, transparent, and scalable payroll experience.

The challenge

Problem

1. Customers had zero visibility into payroll within the platform.

2. Payroll updates were only available by contacting Remote’s payroll specialists.

3. All changes (salary adjustments, leaves, expenses) had to be handled manually via support, creating inefficiency.

Business Goals

• Reduce time spent by Payroll Ops preparing and sharing payroll.

• Reduce customer service load from payroll-related questions.

• Improve customer satisfaction with payroll transparency.

User Needs

• Effortless payroll management with minimal manual work.

• Clear visibility into what contributes to each employee’s pay.

• Ability to manage payroll across multiple countries without deep local expertise.

Design Vision Workshop

I led a cross-functional design workshop with participants from Product Management, Engineering, Customer Support, Payroll, and Content Design. The workshop aimed to build a shared understanding of customer pain points, foster empathy for their day-to-day challenges, and explore key opportunities through brainstorming. This alignment enabled the team to set clear design strategy directions and allowed me to focus on creating high-fidelity future concepts.

Customer Journey

How-Might-We exercise

Brainstorming Sketches

Design Vision Concept

Validation & Iteration

Methodology

Remote user interviews and usability testing with HR admins.

Iterations

Adjusted from separated modules to consolidated employee payroll view; added timeline; explored automation concepts.

Critical Insights

1. Payroll transparency matters more than categorization
   Customers cared about seeing a consolidated view of everything that goes into each paycheck (time off, expenses, incentives), rather than navigating separate sections.

2. Key dates drive trust
   Cutoff dates and pay dates were unclear in the old system, frustrating both admins and employees. We introduced a timeline view that visualizes key milestones—this was strongly validated in testing.

3. Automation is welcomed, not feared
   Customers trusted Remote as the payroll expert and expressed enthusiasm for a “one-click payroll” flow: preview outputs → review → finalize. This insight gave us confidence to design more automation into the experience.

Customer quotes

• “Now I can answer employee questions without chasing payroll specialists.”

• “The timeline makes cutoff dates obvious—I won’t miss them anymore.”

• “One-click finalization would be a game changer.”

Final Solution (MVP)

The MVP introduced a payroll experience with:

• Visibility:

  • Track payroll runs and upcoming paydays at a glance

  • View each employee’s full pay details in one place

  • Access past payroll runs anytime for quick answers

• Control:

  • Review payroll before cutoff so there are no surprises

  • Approve expenses, bonuses, and adjustments easily

  • Finalize payroll knowing everything is accurate

• Flexibility:

  • Manage payroll across teams and countries in one platform

  • Add variable pay items without extra hassle

  • Pull past data instantly for audits or employee requests

Results

• Customer Satisfaction Score: Up from 2.5 → 3.9

• Payroll-related support tickets: Down from 1236 → 802 per month

• Qualitative feedback:

  • Easy to use

  • Faster to respond to employee questions

  • Desire for more advanced controls in future iterations

Final Thoughts

Challenges

• Expanding payroll globally requires deep local compliance expertise.

• Edge cases (e.g., benefits policy changes, country-specific expense rules) add complexity.

Takeaways

• Close collaboration with subject matter experts (payroll specialists, solutions architects) is essential for complex domains.

• Direct customer conversations proved invaluable—once the team heard feedback firsthand, buy-in increased significantly.

Future Considerations

• Extend payroll visibility to employees directly.

• Scale features to support more countries and scenarios.