User Empathy: The Foundation for Delivering the Right Solutions
OVERVIEW
SITUATION
At Paylocity, I served as a Product Design Manager, leveraging my seven years of experience across the entire product suite to help develop a data analytics solution that demonstrated the value of our products to customers.
I was asked to align a portion of my team of four senior designers, one core designer and a staff designer to two product development teams and one data science team focused on this initiative.
Leadership goals:
At the project's outset, leadership defined key objectives:
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Close competitive gaps and increase deal wins
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Prioritize speed to market over extended discovery
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Develop a proprietary algorithm to deliver unique value competitors couldn't match
My role:
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Strategic Leadership: Partnered with leadership to define objectives, set long-term vision, and allocate resources effectively.
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Customer Advocacy: Ensured the customer perspective informed decision-making and prioritization.
PROBLEM
Sales was losing deals because the MVP solution wasn’t competitive in terms of functionality and perceived value. In addition, there was little understanding of customer needs in the product development process.
85% of active users didn't understand the metrics being measured and how it translated to the value that the products were offering their company in the inital MVP.
The product development process lacked a deep understanding of customer needs, leading to assumptions about how customers evaluated product value.
TARGET USERS
Our users consisted of both external client leadership teams and internal sales teams.
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Primary: HR business decision-makers, including their executive teams, evaluating payroll and workforce management software.
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Secondary: Paylocity's sales team, responsible for understanding product offerings and customer pain points to drive more informed sales strategies and close deals.
MARKET
Paycom, our top competitor, provided a high-value solution with advanced analytics features. Paylocity decided to differentiate itself by using an algorithm to deliver actionable insights.
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Paycom had a competitive edge, winning approximately 65% of head-to-head sales opportunities against Paylocity.
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Sales were losing deals due to the HR analytics tool—one of the top 10 requested features—falling short in functionality and perceived value.
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Paylocity targeted small to mid-market customers but quickly shifted strategies to cater to enterprise clients based on the value add to the algorithm.
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Customer base (2019): 20K+ clients with an average company size of 100 employees.
ACTION
PHASE 1: EVALUATION
I paretnered with my designers, product and engineering leaders to determine what research, frameworks and decision-making process needed to be created and updated.
To Do:
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Evaluate the analytics and user feedback to date to identify themes.
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Interview the product managers and engineering teams to gather insight on decision making processes.
Results:
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Perception Issue: Discovery was seen as too time-consuming by teams and leaders.
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Rushed Process: Teams preferred jumping straight to high-fidelity mocks.
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User Drop-Off: 90% of users stopped navigating after exploring a single metric.
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Missed Opportunities: Teams later recognized the need for deeper user research and workflow exploration.
Outcomes:
Data-Driven Conviction
Used analytics and interview insights to highlight gaps in user understanding.
Structured Process
Established a bi-weekly ceremony to review metrics and user feedback.
Leadership Buy-In
*Successfully persuaded leadership to invest in ongoing generative research.
* not without it's own set of challenges: Design had to overcome strong opinions by disagreeing and commiting and promising ongoing reflection of progress.
Continous Improvement
Enabled data-informed decision-making for long-term product success.
PHASE 2: DISCOVERY
At this point we were given the green light to dig a little deeper into the user insights.
To Do:
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Introduce customer research and competitive analysis to inform product decisions.
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Conducted team retrospectives to refine the approach.
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Established structured triad ceremonies (Sprint Planning, Story Grooming, Design Reviews, Retros)
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Defined success metrics based on user behavior and sales feedback.
Results:
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Content mapping: After conducting multiple rounds of interviews with customers of various types and sizes, we established a clear outline for content structure and defined the purpose of each section to help create a redesigned dashboard. Figma file
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Process improvements: By integrating our new ceremonies and maintaining ongoing generative research, teams felt more informed and engaged. Below are key highlights of the improvements based on their feedback.
NO Process | With A Process | |
|---|---|---|
Customer Input | Strong opinions created lots of churn | Better focus and alignment |
Team Sentiment | Too many “closed-door meetings” Lots of disconnect and churn | Better understanding of needs and less churn |
Team Meetings | 0-5 per week | 1-2 per week |
Dev Hours | Harder to track but devs felt there was a lot of unnecessary rework | Hours spent were reduced because of being included upfront |
Design Iterations | 10+ (lost count) per release | 2-3 per release |
Outcomes:
Increased Efficiency
Teams reduced the need for rework by 30%
Increased User Engagement
In the first month of redesigned dashboard release, user engagement increased by 74%
PHASE 3: CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
We established a number of new ceremonies and new team alignments to strengthen and fuel the progress. I also pioneered our new product, engineering and design operating model.
To Do:
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Integrated a new designer with strong research and systems thinking skills.
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Used Google Analytics and and customer interviews to measure user engagement of the newly redesigned dashboard.
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Established a team to help define a new product development operating model.
Results:
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New UX and Product Operating Model: Because of the success these teams had in their collboaration and increase user satisfaction, we were asked to lead the effort with our product business partners to build a new operating model for Product Technology department.
OUTCOMES
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Improved UX and Product Alignment: Discovery efforts led to a more strategic approach to product design.
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Stronger Collaboration: Established a repeatable process for UX to engage with product and engineering.
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Increased Sales Confidence: Sales team had a clearer way to articulate product value.
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New Success Metrics: Shifted focus from feature delivery to user engagement and problem-solving.
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Empowered Team: UX gained respect within the organization by demonstrating the value of discovery.
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User Satisfaction: Users understood the metrics leading to increased engagement and new customers signing with Paylocity.
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Paycom's competitive edge of winning approximately 65% of head-to-head sales opportunities against Paylocity in 2019 was reduced back to previous numbers (50%) in 2020.
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