Payscale: Polaris
Principal/Lead Product Designer & Owner
2020-2021
Originally a north-star initiative I did on the B2B customer experience, Polaris became a reality after leadership agreed it was the path forward for Payscale’s SMB product line. Milestone 1 (MVP) was to replace Benchmark, Payscale’s most basic compensation product with the other SMB products (Insight & Insight Lab) to follow.
The UX and UI of Polaris was designed and developed based on the Goldilocks principle of building products—designing a product together, with your customers. A focus group of “Goldilocks Customers” was created to constantly review the progress of Polaris from vision to mocks to prototypes and then onto the Beta.
I acted as design Stakeholder, managed four other product designers and worked hand-in-hand with Chief Product Officer, Product Director, Engineering Director and Senior Product Manager.
Beta Demo Video
Polaris MVP
For Milestone 1 of Polaris (MVP), we focused on our customers that are overwhelmingly SMB with 80% of them having less than 500 employees and 43% having less than 100 employees. This segment has unique characteristics that differentiate it from other segments. They are more likely than the national average to only have one company location, their organization is typically without a compensation team and rarely spends money on traditional salary surveys.
Polaris provides a simple, affordable solution to have access to Payscale’s robust compensation data, allowing them to quickly and easily price jobs by users who are not compensation professionals but still want to provide accurate and competitive job salaries.
Milestone 2 will be expanding Polaris into our larger SMB segment and replacing our Insight product, followed by Milestone 3, replacing Insight Lab. These two products currently offer much deeper functionality, which will require product parity before customer migration.
Location Manager
Job Manager
Miro Boards for organizing Polaris navigation structure, architecture, content and features
Figma for high fidelity design (Saving a job user flow)