It started with an idea to streamline workflows for project-based companies by automating data import from HR to resource management. Keeping capacity data accurate can enable efficient resource planning and result in massive time savings and a better experience.
It's painful for resource managers to manually bring HR data like contracts and leaves into Runn, and the CSV or bulk edit methods have failed to scale for enterprise customers, making this HR integration work strategically important. I started by gathering evidence of strong demand from support requests, pre-sale recordings, and RFPs, and facilitated feature workshops to align on desired outcomes with the CEO and Head of CS. I collaborated with the dev lead to design various scenarios, error handling, edge cases, and technical constraints. The approved concept significantly improved the UX for integration setup, duplicate resolution, and UI reusability.
To deliver a feasible solution, I made reasonable trade-offs between UX, value, and the effort required to build with 2 senior developers within a 6-week timeframe. Scope for iteration 1 was locked in early through effective negotiation and visual communications with stakeholders. I organized regular weekly updates to ensure quality and iterated based on feedback from beta tests.
This project has generated time efficiency and commercial outcomes, securing 9 new strategic enterprise deals with an average MRR of $7,000 USD each. It has also reduced churn risk and avoided losing prospects to competitors.
Runn focuses on helping companies with project delivery based on accurate resource capacity, bridging between human resource and project management.
We are looking to better fit into the company's existing ecosystem, which puts us in a better position for marketing leads and deal closure. We use a third-party tool called Merge.dve.
As a capacity planning tool, we need to know people's time off, holidays, and contracted capacity. With only CSV imports and manual creation, employee data becomes quickly outdated, leading to scheduling conflicts, manual and repetitive data entry, increased risk of mistakes, and limited resource manager time for high-value work.
With new hires and new leave requests happening all the time, we need a solution to automate the syncing of contracts and time-off to help them catch up with the changes. My role as a product designer and owner: I work with stakeholders and developers to define and deliver the first iteration of syncing with real customer data, and improve based on feedback.
Take a dive into the support requests and pre-sales recordings to understand the customer pain points around how time off is currently handled. In the B2B context, HR integrations are a mandatory business requirement for Runn for many prospects.
Looking from a competitive lens, those customers would switch to other products if Runn doesn't offer integration or if it's not something they see on our website.
Collecting insights from various sources, what's concerning is when managing a large number of employees, frequent time-off requests, and high turnover rates. The manual effort required to keep everything up to date becomes nearly impossible.
Asking employees to triple handle their leave can result in reduced user adoption and decreased accuracy, as employees may be reluctant to engage with multiple platforms. Therefore, not having integration is a huge problem.
“We already put leave into a shared google calendar for the team, and into Harvest. I don't want to ask the team to enter it in a third tool.”
“We have about 600 resources, so a way to bulk add this would be great”
“One source of truth for people management and not having 2 staffing lists”
In a workshop with CS, this map outlines how different integrations work together and emphasizes the importance of timely and accurate HR integrations for businesses to make effective decisions.
Time off changes impact capacity, resulting in changes to the timeline for project delivery. For project-first capacity planning, Runn reflects the demand required for completion, and requirements flow through to HR.
We have obtained buy-in from the Head of CS, who approved the value of having HR integrations as a first mover, so Runn can be the source of truth for capacity, making the future project management planning more valuable.
Here's a workshop I ran with the CEO on high-level problems and my assumed solutions to ensure that his vision is well-understood in detail for functionality, experience (including clarity, privacy, data gap, error prevention, and UI), and documentation.
So, it's a big picture discussion on the key aspects, and CEO alignment is crucial for a successful product development process.
In collaboration with the development team, I was advised to work on thinking through edge cases, scenarios, and 3rd party Merge.dev API constraints.
This clarifies different what-if workflows and shows options on how we can improve user experience on error prevention and recovery.
With a fat marker exploratory approach, we start with fairly disconnected scenarios like the first-time import experience versus ongoing sync. We explore what happens when updating data locally or removing it, and how we fill the data gaps.
But as we walk through more cases, solutions for each edge case start to converge and form a logical sequence to reach an agreement with the developers at a high level.
I sent out a survey to briefly understand what HR people are using and if they would like to opt in for testing. This way, we can prioritize supporting those integrations.
Since we already have timesheet integration and data is the real value users receive, we felt it was pretty low-risk to beta test after the build.
~breathe~
It's the right time to start increasing the flexibility on some of the key screens. This is the first thing users see, and the main question is whether integration has value to them.
Before, it was too technical, and regular customers weren't able to set up without reading our help documentation. We still received lots of support requests when they encountered issues.
In the new version, we focus on clarifying the value and how data works right from the start. Then, we provide them with an onboarding experience for their integration.
We have to manually transfer employee IDs from the remote app to the person we create in Run, one at a time.
We push for auto-match by email. It's not perfect, but it's a huge time saver. That's why we have flexibility in the new UI to review and make changes to complete the same task with a few clicks.
This is the North Star concept that aligns with the CEO's vision, giving the team an opportunity to see the solution holistically and long-term.
I conceptualize how the HR component we build can be reused as we scale. We have other categories of integrations like project management and time tracking, and it's important to ensure a consistent experience across the board and minimize the effort required to build.
~breathe~
At Runn, we have a 6-week development cycle to prioritize speed to market. While discussing with different stakeholders, we have locked in the high-level objective for the first iteration to be saving customer time.
Due to budget constraints, it is only feasible to reduce functionality, reuse existing UI, and minimize customization. Everything else can be considered stretch goals for the future roadmap.
While reducing the number of screens, we also had to rethink the user flow and respond to new technical discoveries from developers. Flow charts and mock-ups are aligned with development efforts to ensure expectations are met.
In the final handoff, I highlight the opportunity for filling the gap, from short-term to expensive options, and indicate the rabbit holes that we concisely decide not to pursue.
With a few screens, the judgment for UX is to provide the best experience in the screens we will actually build and address user concerns
~breathe~
Despite our CEO's emphasis on providing detailed clarity, users still raised concerns about integrating everyone, which causes additional charges, and handling duplicate imports. This reinforces our concern that overwhelming information hampers effective communication, right at the beginning of the integration setup.
An additional intro modal pops up right after the integration selection, this provided a clearer onboarding that smoothly transitions into more detailed information. We've nicknamed it the "5-second rule" because users skim, rather than fully read.
“The integration set up was quick and very simple to do (I’m by far the least technical person in the team so a good test case). The ability to select which employees are imported is important for us, this was very easy to do..” - Jody, Group Managing Director
“Thanks for this functionality as it will help me with less rekeying data. I tested the scenario required for myself and it is good.” - Tijo, Director
~breathe~
