Design leadership · Talent suite · 2017–2019
Scaling design for HCM transformation meant building the team and rhythm behind the work.
As Paylocity expanded its human capital management offering, I moved from UX Lead to Product Design Manager and scaled the Talent design team from two to six. Supporting five connected product areas under sustained delivery pressure required more than interface work: the team needed capacity, a dependable operating cadence, and clearer cross-functional visibility.
- Role
- UX Lead → Product Design Manager
- Scope
- People leadership · Hiring and onboarding · Design operations · Cross-functional delivery · Talent product portfolio
- Timeframe
- 2017–2019
Two-minute summary
The transformation required a design function that could scale with the portfolio.
The starting point
Paylocity was broadening its offering beyond payroll into a fuller HCM platform. The Talent category needed design support across several product areas, but a two-person design team could not sustainably cover the growing portfolio in parallel.
What I changed
I helped grow the team from two to six designers, led hiring and onboarding, introduced a biweekly design-sprint rhythm, established monthly executive reviews, and created cross-team creative reviews that made work and tradeoffs more visible.
What the team supported
The expanded practice supported delivery and enhancement across Learning, Recruiting, Compensation, Performance Journals, and Onboarding while partnering with product, engineering, design, and operations leaders.
The durable lesson
Under pressure, design leadership is operating-model work. Capacity matters, but teams also need sequence, decision forums, quality expectations, and a visible way to negotiate tradeoffs.
What I want a hiring leader to knowI scale design by making the work legible: clarify ownership, create a dependable cadence, grow the right capacity, and give teams a shared place to resolve tradeoffs before they become production problems.
Context and mandate
A product-portfolio expansion created an organizational design problem.
The Talent category was part of Paylocity’s broader move toward a more complete HCM offering. That expansion increased the number of product surfaces, stakeholders, and dependencies that design needed to support at the same time.
My mandate was to strengthen design capacity without separating design from delivery. I remained accountable for design outcomes while partnering with senior product and development leadership, the VP of Design, and cross-functional directors across the category.
Conditions to design for
- Multiple Talent product areas advancing in parallel
- Compressed delivery expectations
- New designers needing domain and organizational context
- Decisions distributed across product, design, engineering, and operations
Scale the team
Grow capacity without losing the connective tissue.
The visible number moved from two designers to six. The leadership work around that number was hiring, onboarding, mentoring, allocation, and creating enough shared context for new capacity to become useful capacity.
October 2017
2 designers
A small team carrying design responsibility across a growing Talent portfolio.
2017–2019
4 hires
Four hiring cycles, followed by onboarding, mentoring, and integration into active product work.
March 2019
6 designers
A three-times-larger practice able to distribute design leadership across multiple product areas.
Create the cadence
Make priorities, critique, and tradeoffs visible on a dependable rhythm.
The operating model connected detailed design work to portfolio decisions. Each forum had a different job, and together they reduced the amount of coordination that depended on private context.
Biweekly
Sequence
Design sprints created a recurring unit for planning work, exposing dependencies, and keeping commitments visible.
Cross-team
Review
Creative reviews gave designers a shared place to challenge decisions, transfer context, and raise quality concerns.
Monthly
Align
Executive reviews connected detailed design work to portfolio priorities, risks, and delivery tradeoffs.
Continuous
Grow
Hiring, onboarding, and mentoring built capacity while keeping new designers connected to real product decisions.
Support the portfolio
Five Talent product areas. One connected design responsibility.
The work crossed distinct user journeys and product teams. I led design capacity and coordination across the category while product-area specialists retained ownership of their individual work.
Learning
Design leadership supporting a new learning-management capability within the HCM portfolio.
Recruiting
Design support for workflows connecting candidate and employer needs.
Compensation
Design support for complex, data-sensitive compensation workflows.
Performance Journals
Design support for ongoing performance documentation and employee-manager workflows.
Onboarding
Design support for the transition from candidate to employee across connected HCM experiences.
Evidence and limits
Use the strongest facts without asking them to prove more than they can.
The evidence combines Garrett’s internal experience record with company-level public reporting. Those sources answer different questions and remain visibly separated.
Internal experience record
2 → 6
designers
Four hires increased the Talent design practice from two designers in October 2017 to six by March 2019.
Internal experience record
5
Talent product areas
Learning, Recruiting, Compensation, Performance Journals, and Onboarding were delivered or enhanced during the broader HCM expansion.
2019 Form 10-K
$300.0M → $467.6M
Paylocity total revenue, FY17–FY19
Company revenue increased 55.9% across the period. This establishes business scale; it does not attribute growth to design or to the Talent team.
Directional estimates—not audited metrics
- Design-to-production cycles moved from roughly six months toward roughly three months.
- Designer ramp-up moved from roughly 90 days toward roughly 45 days.
Reflection
What I carried forward from the messy middle of growth.
Cadence turns pressure into sequence.
Recurring planning and review forums did not remove delivery pressure. They made the pressure discussable, gave dependencies a place to surface, and created clearer moments for decisions.
Hiring is only the beginning of capacity.
A larger team creates leverage only when people can build domain context, see how decisions are made, and receive useful critique while contributing to real work.
I would establish shared foundations earlier.
With the benefit of hindsight, I would invest earlier in partner guidelines, reusable foundations, and clearer quality expectations so individual designers had more structural support in cross-functional negotiations.
The work prepared me for a broader pattern I would keep pursuing: shared systems scale when ownership, contribution, and decision rhythms are designed as deliberately as the interface.