From comms tool to HR tech unicorn: shaping a UX strategy that supports millions of employees
TL:DR - Previously known as a top-down comms tool, I contributed to making Beekeeper the leading employee experience suite for desk-less teams. Strategic initiatives led to high monthly user engagement.
33k
Onboarding workflows
Welcome aboard! 🎉
10.2k
PTO requests
Enjoy your vacation! 🌴
70k
Payslips sent
It’s pay day! 🤑
3.7k
Safety automations
Safety first! 👷
Our data showed high revenue potential with HR use cases. So I took ownership and interviewed 15 HR leaders in depth.
Main takeaway? In industries with high and costly staff turnover, HR teams consider employee retention their most important KPI. And they’re investing in 6 key areas.
🌱
New hire onboarding
Employees need to feel welcomed while being set them up for success. This phase is both crucial and overwhelming.
🙌
Employee engagement
Corporate announcements don’t make frontline workers feel included. Being heard and recognised makes them stick around.
💙
Benefits
Because a lot of workers earn minimum wages, HR leaders want to make employees stay with benefits beyond the paycheck.
🦺
Training & safety
Effective training is important for compliance and reduces the negative impact of safety incidents.
⚙️
Admin automations
HR teams are understaffed and often buried in admin work. Automations can free up time they can dedicate to strategy.
👩💻
Empowering managers
An HRBP often supports dozens of managers at once. Enabling managers with HR processes can remove bottlenecks.
Existing roadmap commitments made it challenging to turn those insights into action. We needed to prove our point first.
During a short sprint dedicated to innovation, I made employee recognition stand out as a use case to my squad. It turned out to be highly desirable, viable... and surprisingly feasible:
- The back end was built with existing functionality such as automations, posts, forms and chatbots
- We quickly put together a dedicated analytics dashboard for HR leaders using Metabase
- The commercial interest from customers and prospects was high. In fact, several customers had already stitched together a recognition program... we made it a one-click setup experience.
Early customer feedback and adoption made it clear we were on the right track. Sales and CS teams were hyped, and the trust with leadership started building up.
14%
Adoption
During early access
143
Customers
Enabled the feature
1,732
Recognitions
Sent by employees
11.6%
Submission rate
Of the recognition form
We then built a strategic HR module that skyrocketed customer adoption and engagement.
Ultimately, it led to a $1.1B merge and acquisition deal.
For our business case, I led a really intense product discovery cycle, collecting insights from lots of different sources until we could connect the dots and find our focus.
😣
20% of support tickets — over 1,500 in 2024 — were requests about payslips, benefits, PTO, etc. that employees mistakenly sent to our support team.
🔎
15% of MAU used the search function. Analysing search queries, about a third of them were about HR topics, indicating employees really need HR support.
🤔
100k+ users visited their profile every month, despite it being quite empty. This surfaced an expectation from employees to find something useful there.
📊
External industry reports supported our insights: we found evidence that effective onboarding can boost employee retention by a staggering 82%!
🌐
Competitive analysis was also useful. Many competitors focused on efficiency, scheduling, Ops… no one had a meaningful offering for onboarding desk-less teams.
💰
Our sales and CS teams confirmed the high interest from customers and prospects for opportunities in onboarding, PTO, payslips, training, etc.
The opportunity became clear: evolving the user profile into a centralised Employee Hub that would especially support new hires in the critical first weeks.
- ✅ Make it easy for new hires to track their onboarding progress
- ✅ Include upcoming events, especially safety training
- ✅ Provide easy access to key HR documents and contacts
- ✅ Expose company benefits in a clear way
- ✅ Enhance L&D through LMS integrations and micro-learning
For HR leaders and admins, easy setup and actionable analytics remained the core values.
Most setups are very simple, which would probably not fit HR needs in modern tech companies... but we're talking about overworked teams that run onboarding through spreadsheets and printed out documents. Digitisation has to start somewhere.
Early KPIs were strong indicators of improved, streamlined employee experience and the strategic value of HR use cases.
After a few months, these were some of the numbers calculated on a 30-day window:
33k
Onboarding workflows
Welcome aboard! 🎉
10.2k
PTO requests
Enjoy your vacation! 🌴
70k
Payslips sent
It’s pay day! 🤑
3.7k
Safety automations
Safety first! 👷
Project learnings and reflections
🤝
Cross-functional collaboration is everything. The biggest wins came from alignment across engineering, design, PM, CS, support, sales, etc.
⚖️
Stakeholder management was the hardest part. Balancing big-customer requests against long-term value was a constant challenge. And I like challenges!
🧪
Experimentation unlocked momentum. Once we earned trust to test, break and iterate, experimentation became a strategy. And the work became more fun.
