Senior Product Designer · 2022–2025 · SaaS, HR Tech

GoCo

Led design for three years across the whole product, from reports to onboarding to the design system. The longest and most impactful role of my career.

200K+

Platform users

60%

CSAT increase

↓30%

Support tickets

10+

Product areas shipped

GoCo employee record — personal details and full employment info

Part 1

my time at goco

GoCo.io is a U.S.-based HR, benefits, and payroll platform for small and mid-sized businesses, serving 200,000+ users across thousands of companies. Think of it as the operating system HR managers live in every day: onboarding new hires, managing time off, running payroll, handling benefits enrollment.

I joined in July 2022 as a Senior Product Designer on a two-person design team. Two years in, a Director of Design came on board. I worked with 8 product managers over my tenure, most closely with Kyler Holway and Erin Phillips, and collaborated with multiple engineering teams across the product. I stayed until GoCo was acquired by Intuit in early 2025.

Context & team

My role: Senior Product Designer (2-person design team)
Reported to: Director of Design (joined year 2)
Collaborated with: 8 PMs, multiple engineering teams

What I shipped

10+ product areas over 3 years

I didn’t own one feature, I designed across the whole product surface. Here’s the scope.

Homepage

Company dashboard with quick access to benefits, payroll sync, messages, and expense-management modules.

Employee Profiles

Profile pages with timeline view, notes, praise, improvement flags, reviews, and employment changes in one place.

Time Off

Request and approval flow with a list-detail pattern. Inline approvals let managers act without leaving context.

Scheduling

Weekly calendar for shift-based teams. Drag-to-assign reduced scheduling time from 45 min to 15 min per week.

Payroll

Payroll-run interface with team-member filtering, bulk actions, and a prepare-preview-summary flow before processing.

Workflows

Configurable multi-step engine for onboarding, background checks, and offboarding, with progress tracking and assignee management.

Design system

Built GoCo’s first design system from scratch

When I joined there was no shared component library, every screen was designed from scratch, causing visual inconsistencies across 12+ product modules. I built a comprehensive system covering components, tokens, patterns, and documentation.

120+

Components built

↓35%

Design-to-dev handoff time

12+

Product modules unified

GoCo design system — buttons, inputs, selection controls, tabs, segmented controls and alert messages with full state and variant coverage — GoCo design system, the core component library, reconstructed

Process transformation

Changed how the team designs

Beyond shipping features, I worked with the Director of Design to overhaul the design process itself. When I joined, decisions were mostly ad-hoc. By the time I left, there was a structured, repeatable process.

Introduced design critiques and weekly reviews, moved from “designer presents final” to “team reviews in-progress work.” Caught issues ~2 weeks earlier on average.

Established a research-first approach, no feature went into design without user interviews or data analysis. Previously most features started from stakeholder requests without validation.

Created a shared Figma library, one source of truth for the whole team. Reduced “which version is correct?” questions to zero.

Standardized handoff documentation, specs, interaction notes, edge cases. Engineering stopped asking “how should this behave when…” because it was already documented.

Part 2, Deep Dive

reports redesign

Of everything I shipped at GoCo, the Reports redesign had the clearest before/after impact and the most interesting design decisions. It was the project where I had the most autonomy, the problem was well-defined, and the results were directly measurable.

This is the story of how I took GoCo’s most-hated feature and turned it into its fastest-growing one.

The problem

The Reports feature generated 30% of all support tickets

HR managers called the report builder “confusing” and “unreliable” in customer interviews.
Monthly active usage was below 28%, the lowest of any major feature.
Everything lived on a single cluttered screen with no guidance or preview.
A frequent rework cycle: build report → export → discover errors → rebuild from scratch.

Research

The data was fine. The flow wasn’t.

6 HR-manager interviews, all described trial-and-error report building. Most exported 2–3 times before getting it right. No one understood the filter logic.
Support-data analysis, filter misconfiguration and failed exports were the top two ticket categories, together ~30% of all inbound volume.
Competitive audit, every modern reporting tool (Looker, Mode, even Google Sheets) uses progressive disclosure. GoCo’s single-screen approach was an outlier.

GoCo reporting overview — standard report packs and custom reports — GoCo’s reporting surface, standard report packs across HR, benefits, time, and payroll, plus fully custom reports. The custom builder is the piece I rebuilt.

Key decisions & trade-offs

Decision 1

3-step flow: Fields → Filters → Schedule

Split the monolithic report builder into three focused steps. Each step has exactly one job. Users complete one decision before moving to the next.

Why this, not the alternativesWe explored a wizard (too rigid, power users hated being locked into a linear path), a sidebar-panel approach (not enough room for the data preview), and an AI-suggested approach (too risky for v1, saved for later). The tabbed flow balanced guidance for new users with flexibility for experienced ones.

Decision 2

Live preview before saving

Users see actual report results as they configure, killing the export-to-check cycle that caused most support tickets.

Why this, not the alternativesA “dry run” button was simpler to build but added friction (click → wait → check → go back). Inline preview was costlier to engineer (real-time queries) but eliminated the entire export-check-rebuild loop. We bet on the harder path and it paid off.

Decision 3

Smart defaults based on report type

Instead of a blank slate, pre-filled the most common fields for each report type. Time-to-first-report dropped by over 50%.

Why this, not the alternativesTemplates were too restrictive, users felt boxed in and couldn’t customize. A “start from template” flow added an extra decision point. Smart defaults gave a starting point users could immediately modify without feeling locked in.

The rebuilt GoCo report builder — Fields, Filters, and a live data preview — The rebuilt builder, a focused Fields → Filters → Visualization flow with a live preview that updates as you configure, so there’s nothing to export to check.

Before vs. after

Before

After

One cluttered screen for everything

3-step guided flow

No preview, export to find errors

Live preview before export

Blank-slate start every time

Smart defaults pre-filled

<28% monthly active usage

52% monthly active usage

30% of all support tickets

Support tickets down 30%

Impact & results

↓30%

Fewer support tickets

2.2×

Faster report creation

+60%

Customer satisfaction

28→52%

Monthly active usage

Reports went from the biggest pain point to the fastest-growing feature. The 3-step flow pattern was adopted across the product, onboarding, survey creation, and benefits enrollment all moved to the same progressive-disclosure approach.

Reflection

If I could redo this, I’d push harder for A/B testing the smart defaults. We shipped one set based on interview data, but different company sizes likely need different presets, a 20-person company runs very different reports than a 500-person one.

The bigger takeaway from 3 years at GoCo: progressive disclosure is almost always the answer for enterprise tools. Users want depth, but they want to choose when to access it. Every time we put complexity behind an intentional action, engagement went up.