Scaling compensation cycle setup for enterprise customers
OVERVIEW
Complete is a compensation management platform used by HR teams to configure and launch company-wide cycles. As Complete expanded from small and mid-sized businesses to larger enterprise customers, its compensation cycle setup no longer scaled.
As the sole product designer, I redesigned the compensation cycle setup experience to support the scale and complexity of enterprise customers.
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
RESPONSIBILITIES
End-to-end UX & UI Design Process
COLLABORATORS
CEO, Engineering, Customer Success, Sales
TIMELINE
Q3 2025
THE CHALLENGE
Enterprise customers needed a product that could keep up
The original flow was designed for smaller teams running simple, linear cycles. Enterprise customers had fundamentally different needs — more employees, more complex org structures, and multi-stakeholder workflows the product couldn't support.
ORIGINAL PERSONA
Peter Parker
Founder of a 30-person startup
“I just need to get raises out the door and not mess anything up.”
Founder, running comp solo
Small team, simple comp cycles
Needs guidance and confidence
NEW PERSONA
Mary Jane
HR Admin at a 1,000-person company
“Running comp for 5,000 people isn't something I can set up in one sitting.”
Coordinates across finance, managers, and execs
Large cycles require bulk actions and complex configuration
Needs to work non-linearly as inputs arrive from other stakeholders
LISTENING TO FEEDBACK
The same friction points kept surfacing
Through customer success escalations and direct customer feedback, we kept hearing the same painpoints.
STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS
POOR VISIBILITY
With only three visible stages, admins had no sense of what configuration actually entailed or how much was left to do.
FORCED FLOW
Real comp cycles don’t happen in sequence. Information arrives at different times from different stakeholders.
A forced, sequential navigation introduced more friction than guidance when it came to enterprise workflows.
Managing employee eligibility at scale was tedious and unintuitive.
STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS
MANUAL AND TEDIOUS
Setting up eligibility required manually creating each exclusion reason and hunting through an unsearchable list to find and assign employees.
MISSING STEPS
Key parts of a comp cycle like approvals and promotions had no home in the product. Admins had to manage them outside of Complete entirely.
DEFINING FOCUS AREAS
Key insights & themes
We synthesized the feedback into themes to define what the new experience needed to get right.
1. NON-LINEAR BY DESIGN
Comp cycles involve inputs from across the organization arriving at different times. The experience needed to reflect that reality.
2. FLEXIBILITY WITH GUARDRAILS
Unlocking flexibility for enterprise admins couldn't come at the cost of the guidance that smaller teams depend on.
3. BUILT FOR SCALE
Managing bulk operations for hundreds of employees required a fundamentally different interaction model.
HOW MIGHT WE
How might we redesign the comp cycle setup to meet the complexity of enterprise customers without losing the simplicity that made it work for smaller teams?
FINAL DESIGNS
An MVP built for enterprise scale
The insights shaped three core areas of the product. A more flexible navigation, a new way to monitor cycle health before launch, and a smarter eligibility experience.
REIMAGED NAVIGATION
The redesigned navigation surfaces all steps upfront, giving admins the freedom to configure in any order. No more being blocked mid-setup waiting on information that isn't ready yet.
PLAN HEALTH MONITORING
Review & Finalize gives admins a single place to monitor cycle health before launch. Instead of relying on sequential gates to catch mistakes, admins can see the status of every step at once and act on what needs attention.
BULK INTERACTION MODELS
The new eligibility experience replaces manual reason creation with search, filters, and bulk selection. Admins can find and exclude large groups of employees in seconds rather than searching through an unsearchable list.
IMPACT
The results
The redesign had a measurable impact on Complete's ability to serve and retain enterprise customers.
+18%
ACV INCREASE
Average contract value grew as the product became viable for enterprise customers at a higher price point.
+30%
EXPANSION RATE
3 out of 10 existing customers expanded their contracts after the redesign.
6.2 → 7.4
CSAT IMPROVEMENT
Setup satisfaction scores collected by our CSM was validation of the experience moving in the right direction.
ENGINEERING CAPACITY FREED
Every comp cycle season, our engineers were pulled away from product work to act as tech support. The redesigned, self-serve experience allowed the team to maintain product velocity during peak season.
