Product Design
From internal tool to the next LinkedIn — transforming HR performance into a visionary platform.
Socyal started life as a no-code app-builder — a platform that let non-technical teams create internal business tools. One module kept outperforming the rest: the HR performance management tool. Companies were using it to track goals, run performance reviews, and manage team feedback.
The founders saw an opportunity. What if this module wasn’t just a feature inside a no-code platform, but a standalone product? What if it could grow beyond internal HR tooling into something more ambitious — a place where professional growth, recognition, and career development happened in public, like LinkedIn, but grounded in real performance data instead of self-reported achievements?
The vision was bold: build the next LinkedIn, but make it honest.
Turning that vision into reality meant dealing with some structural obstacles:
One designer supporting multiple products. There was no dedicated design capacity for the kind of deep, sustained exploration a new product vision demands. Every hour on Socyal was an hour not spent on the existing platform.
The existing HR module was built for desktop use in corporate environments. The new vision needed a mobile-first approach — professionals checking feedback between meetings, celebrating achievements in real-time, engaging with their growth on the go. The entire interaction paradigm had to shift.
The company’s culture and decisions were rooted in engineering. Design was treated as a service function — making things look nice after the real decisions were made. For Socyal to succeed, design needed a seat at the table, shaping the product vision alongside business and engineering.
We spent the first six weeks in deep discovery, talking to three distinct user groups:
They wanted visibility. Their work disappeared into a void — annual performance reviews, sporadic feedback, opaque career growth. They wanted a continuous, visible record of their contributions and progress.
They needed metrics. Drowning in qualitative data with no way to spot trends, compare teams, or measure program impact. They wanted dashboards that turned feedback into something actionable.
They needed trends. Not just snapshots from quarterly reviews, but continuous signals to help them coach effectively and step in early when someone was struggling.
All three perspectives pointed to the same insight: performance management is broken because it’s episodic instead of continuous, private instead of visible, and retrospective instead of real-time.
The first two months went toward turning discovery insights into a product vision. We built moodboards exploring different aesthetic directions — enterprise SaaS, consumer social, editorial — and tested emotional responses with potential users.
A concept deck laid out the full product vision: what Socyal could become in one year, three years, five years. That deck became the founding document, aligning the team around a shared destination before we’d designed a single screen.
With the vision set, we moved into rapid exploration. Dozens of concepts sketched, discussed, and thrown out. Feed-based layouts, card-based dashboards, timeline views, hybrid models. Each direction was tested against three criteria: does it serve all three user groups, does it feel different from existing HR tools, and does it scale to the five-year vision?
The final month was all about building investor-ready prototypes in Adobe XD. These weren’t wireframes — they were fully realized, interactive experiences with real content, real interactions, and real emotional impact.
The prototypes covered the complete user journey: onboarding, daily engagement, giving and receiving feedback, goal tracking, performance reviews, and the public profile that would set Socyal apart.
The most important outcome wasn’t a product — it was a shift in what the organization believed was possible. Before the design work, Socyal was an idea that excited the founders but couldn’t gain traction with investors or the broader team. Too abstract, too far from the current product, too ambitious.
The high-fidelity prototypes changed that. When stakeholders could see, touch, and navigate the future product, belief followed. Investors saw a market opportunity. Engineers saw technical challenges worth solving. The team saw a mission worth committing to.
“Design is a catalyst for belief” became the project’s defining takeaway. In early-stage products, the designer’s job goes beyond interfaces — it’s about making the invisible visible, the abstract tangible, and the ambitious feel achievable.
The investor-ready prototype served double duty: it opened funding conversations and gave the engineering team a concrete target. Instead of building toward a spec document, they were building toward an experience they’d already used. That flipped the traditional dynamic and gave design a strategic authority it hadn’t held before.
The team came out of those five months re-energized, aligned, and equipped with the visual and strategic foundation to build the product they’d always imagined but could never quite articulate.
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