Gusto
Easy to use payroll, HR, and benefits for small and medium businesses. Gusto provides simple solutions to complex problems. We take care of your team and give you peace of mind so you can focus on growing your businesses.
Gusto is a mission driven company that prides itself on well designed, easy solutions to the very complex problems payroll, taxes, benefits, and Human Resources. Gusto’s mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life.
Small business owners wear many hats. Gusto helps them create thriving teams and businesses by simplifying the administrative and compliance work of payroll and hiring and focusing on caring for the people on your team.
My role at Gusto was Head of Design for the Mid Market Employer facing products.
Mid Market Employers were a new and important customer for Gusto. I was Head of Design for this team and co-lead the business group for this horizon 2 initiative. I built and led a team of designers, researchers, and content designers responsible for better understanding this new customer and building products that solved their needs. These new products allowed Gusto to grow with the businesses it served and attract new customers to grow our own business.
Our customers are the incredible people who own and run small and medium businesses. As their companies grow, so do the complexity of their needs.
The problems we’re solving grow with the companies themselves. When a business is small, they need simple payroll, affordable benefits, seamless onboarding, and peace of mind that you’re staying complaint.
As your company grows, so do your needs. You need more support attracting and hire top talent. You need help growing and retaining your incredible employees. Your payroll needs also get more complex with multiple admins and types of workers. You need more powerful tools with nuanced controls, while still wanting solutions that feel simple and fast.
One solution we worked on was hiring and onboarding employees in a way that’s fast and made your employees feel cared for and welcome to your team.
We built tools for recurring, sending offer letters, setting up software, adding employees to your payroll, getting their families set up with benefits, and much more.
The process I used started with generative research to understand the larger problems and needs of small businesses when it comes to hiring. We talked to both employers and employees to understand pain points and potential for improvement. We turned our research insights into ideas and eventually products, testing and iterating along the way.
Our tools were designed to scale with your business. They needed to work for your first employee and your thousandth employee. They need to support you as a novice business owner and continue to be useful and valuable to you as an expert.
Gusto has a stelar reputation when it comes to small businesses. My team’s job was to extend that simplicity to growing companies and experts. This required adding new capabilities, more flexibility, and more advanced functionality - all without making the product feel complex. The best solutions added these new features in a way that also benefited smaller companies, providing them with learning and information along the way. Progressively disclosing features and functionality as they became needed.
I’m incredibly proud of the work we did at Gusto.
It was a privilege to interact with so many incredible small business owners and employees, designing products to automate, simplify, and enhance their work lives, so they could focus on their own customers and business goals.
