Bambee

I joined Bambee when the company was five people. The founder had visionary energy and ideas, and the brief was to put product design on what would become a B2B HR platform pairing small businesses with a dedicated HR manager who handled compliance, terminations, policy reviews, and ongoing HR operations. Over six years the product shipped as two surfaces on a shared data layer: a customer-facing platform the business owner used directly, and an internal platform where Bambee's HR managers ran the operational side of those customer relationships.

The engagement covered three concurrent workstreams.

The customer-facing platform handled onboarding, policy management, employee records, compliance dashboards, and the workflows a small-business owner needs to run an HR program. Over six years we shipped major surfaces on top of the foundation, including payroll and time tracking. The internal platform was where Bambee's HR managers worked: a unified customer timeline across chat, phone, and email; compliance status per client with state-specific tracking; and guided workflows for high-stakes processes like terminations, policy reviews, and benefits administration. Both surfaces were designed against a shared component library so the underlying data model held together as the product expanded.

The onboarding flow was Bambee's primary revenue driver. I designed it as an adaptive experience that changed shape based on company size: a conversational flow for the smallest customers, a guided flow with document categorization for mid-size companies, and a bulk mode with CSV parsing and OCR-based document sorting for larger accounts. Document processing ran on traditional workflow engineering: optical character recognition, automated sorting, and compliance document classification. The flow ran in parallel as a self-serve product and a phone-guided experience an HR manager could walk a customer through live.

I hired and led a design team of three across the customer product, the internal HR-manager platform, and the marketing surface. Underneath sat Pollen, the design system that gave engineering a shared vocabulary across both product lines: the same components, the same tokens, the same patterns whether the surface was customer-facing or internal. Pollen lived in Figma, Storybook, and code. Three designers covered every surface across six years of growth.

Six years of design leadership across the customer product, the internal HR-manager platform, the onboarding revenue engine, and the design system. The company scaled from zero to 10,000 small-business customers, $25M ARR, $65M raised through Series C, and a $400M+ valuation, with three designers behind every surface.