Remote worker offboarding

Laying foundations to platformize and automate a very manual process

Firstbase is a B2B service with a focus is on remote equipment management and logistics.

My role: Lead Product Designer, Strategist, & Researcher

Key contributions: Stakeholder interviews, user interviews, journeymapping, product design, usability testing

I partnered with a Product Manager to define the scope of MVP, and break the engineering work down into incremental milestones.

Project Summary

Problem: Leaving a remote company and returning equipment is a completely manual and long process. In order for Firstbase to scale this service, we needed to bring this core experience and business offering to the platform to open doors for automation.

Goal: Design a self-service experience for admins to offboard workers returning physical equipment to Firstbase warehouses.

Impact: On top of a self-service experience, (1) automate the first user touchpoint, lowering time from 48 hours to a few seconds; (2) bring the experience on-platform, which (3) laid the foundation for future enhancements, integrations, and scale.

Multiplayer Journey

Offboarding a worker using Firstbase centers around Workers who are leaving their companies, but there are many players involved to make this happen.

Worker

People who are leaving their job and need to return company equipment

Admin

IT / HR professionals managing worker and company equipment

Firstbase Internal teams

Warehouse and support teams who process the returns for offboardings

A big goal of this project was to bring this process on-platform, because offboardings and returns were being done via emails and spreadsheets, which made it difficult to have visibility when analyzing data for business and customer needs.

I needed to understand our starting point and what exactly we did. I conducted stakeholder interviews with Firstbasers, who were my partners throughout the entirety of this journey.

♨️ Added challenge: Working with over 20 teammates

Given Firstbase’s growth at the time of this project, tools and processes that I learned about at this stage ended up evolving but the core problem remained the same until I completed the MVP. I started with consulting 8 stakeholders and finished the project having collaborated with more than 20 teammates, including a PM who joined to help me define the scope of the MVP and drive the project to completion.

♨️ Working with over 20 teammates

Problems with manual offboarding

Those stakeholder conversations revealed that, among many, the biggest problems with the existing manual process were …

Off platform

Everything was manually tracked and executed on emails and spreadsheets #StartupLife

Super manual

Humans were driving every step of the process from outreach to pickup arrangement

Long process with no viz

Workers were at the waiting for our support team’s queue of tickets to even start offboarding

Firstbase + Zendesk + Retool = Offboarding

To understand what surfaces needed to be designed on the customer app, I needed to visualize how the systems talk to each other. I drafted where data would flow and how it would affect which player in the journey:

Admins who need a Worker offboarded

Workers who are being offboarded and need to return their equipment
Firstbaser teams conducting the offboarding for our customers

Admins who need a Worker offboarded

Workers who are being offboarded and need to return their equipment
Firstbaser teams conducting the offboarding for our customers

Admins who need a Worker offboarded

Workers who are being offboarded and need to return their equipment
Firstbaser teams conducting the offboarding for our customers

Self-reported offboardings on Firstbase

Once I had the flows mapped out, it was much easier to design the appropriate experiences.

Admins: Schedule offboardings

Admins needed to start the processes directly on platform. I conducted feedback sessions with our customers and stakeholders to determine what data points we needed to collect. Date was a major one, along with the actual equipment retrieved.

Given the rules of the design system at the time, this flow to collect relevant data from Admins was put into a multi-step modal. On top of it all, this project had become so large (with all of what needs to be done), several tradeoffs had to be made, including fixing some data inaccuracies.

Admins: Communicating return conditions

As a part of wanting to know when returns are completed, Admins were keen to know the condition of their inventory when Firstbase receives them and if there’s anything they need to approve for repairs. Part of this project was including more granular statuses for the return items along with conditions that felt familiar.

Workers: Arranging returns

Given the cost of work equipment, it is crucial that we confirm certain details with the workers. By turning this into an automated self-serve feature, workers don’t have to wait for our support team to manually reach out.

Measuring success

Building on the foundation of this offboarding house, the team is now measuring the quantitative impact on automating notifications for workers and Firstbasers. We’re also gathering qualitative feedback from customers via CSAT, NPS, and communications through our support teams. Now that the customer-facing features are out, my next adventure was on optimizing and platformizing more of the processes for our Firstbaser teams to better deliver on this service. I worked on retiring even more of the manual emails and spreadsheets used to get this work done 🤖

Kind words from my teammates

Along the way, my teammates were kind enough to give me kudos for my work:

"Martha brought Offboarding to life! Last August she started working mostly by herself to research the space and bring definition to what the product experience should look like. A lot of people contributed to ship it yesterday, but I wanted to give a special shoutout and thanks to Martha for the creative vision that got it all started." — Ian Cairns, VP of Product & Design

"Martha's combo of empathy, organizational and creative talents produce kick ass creative spaces. Some of the best fun I've had at Firstbase has been dragging stickies around with her in brainstorms she moderates. And it's fun because it works! Watching her take offboarding from concept to reality was a special learning experience for me. I took those learnings into my first Miro mod responsibilities when Martha and I collaborated on Buyouts. Martha's creative talents bring out my own (usually more dormant!) creative side. I think she has that effect on all her colleagues. She's an influencer!" — Neil Fennerty, Operations Manager

"Being her first major project, Martha did an impressive job leading the UX work of the Offboarding project and designing a new feature from scratch. She quickly bonded with all key players internally to ensure that the Ops/CX teams needs are met as much as possible." — Abdullah Aldegaither, Product Manager

"I value how Martha takes feedback for proposed design solutions onboard. Regardless of whether she sees its applicability right away, Martha always prepared to expand on the reasoning behind the implemented design and explore opportunities for improvement. Martha has approachable and supportive attitude which makes the working process pleasant and efficient." — Aliya Hainey, Senior Software Engineer

Lessons Learned

Good enough, for now

There’s so much more to this feature that I want to improve on to deliver enhanced experiences for Workers, Admins, and Firstbasers. However, partnering with my team and #StartupLife, I had to hold the Good Enough principle close to my heart. Given the shifting needs of a fast-moving startup, there was much more I wanted to do for this project that needed additional discovery, definition, and prioritization with product.

Shipping this feature meant laying the foundation for a very big house that we planned to build at Firstbase. More to come 🚀

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