Payfit

<h1>Crossing the Pond to Design the Future of Payroll… And Her Own</h1><p>Despite her utterly French sounding name, Eleonore de&nbsp;Lusignan is an American, born and raised in the United States. However, with two parents from Europe, she grew up in a French household, offering her the perks of a dual culture.&nbsp;</p><p>She had a technical mind and an artistic spirit, so she decided to study industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Web design was still in its infancy and it was impossible to find a design school that provided training dedicated to technical fields. However the school’s curriculum offered a few technological and web-oriented courses.</p><p>Her first dive into web design was prototyping with IoT. Then, she discovered the power of coding. She was immediately drawn to it. Determined to delve deeper into this new playing field, she decided to teach herself and explore various programming languages.</p><p>She graduated in 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, but she wouldn’t let the situation deter her. She wanted to keep learning and land somewhere where she could satisfy her budding passion. She decided to take advantage of the French side of her upbringing: her next move would be to cross the pond to discover her origins.&nbsp;</p><p>At the time, Product Design was still in its early stage. Yet when she got into the UX&nbsp;Paris design community, she was hooked, and determined to learn on the fly. She quit her job and went freelance. After a few missions, she landed in a consulting firm that implemented B2B digital software for customers. There, she was exposed to a wide variety of customers, and business problems of massive scale, such as transportation, healthcare, goods and services. The diversity and ongoing learning experience kept her going for a while.&nbsp;</p><p>But after five years of experience in consulting, she felt that it was time to move over to a startup environment. She wanted her job to have more impact. She decided to join PayFit, a scaleup that would answer all her needs for meaningful projects.</p><h2>At PayFit, We Design a Payroll for Tomorrow</h2><p>I’ve been with PayFit for four years. What drew me to them was the company’s mission in the&nbsp;small and midsize business&nbsp;sector, the design culture, and the tech innovation of the product, with its foundations built in low-code. Not to mention, the speed at which the company grew was impressive!</p><h3>Innovative and Fast-Paced: A Company on the Go</h3><p>PayFit was unlike any other company I’d worked with before. They were young and dynamic, and anyone here could really contribute in a big way to the product and make an impact. It’s still the case. We’re like a living organism where everyone has a role to play: if you have an idea about ways to improve the customer experience, you’ll be listened to, heard. There will always be someone who will talk with you, give you feedback, and move this idea forward. We’re all aiming for the same goal!</p><p>At PayFit, I work in the Product and Technology Department. I manage a team of six designers. Together, we shape the way our customers prepare and close payroll to generate their employees’ pay stubs. That’s the core of PayFit’s product. Due to variations in compliance in each country we operate in, to ensure the best for our customers, we must work closely with our local product and support teams. My job entails working with my team, engineers and product managers, to define what features will come next for our customers. This implies mixing inputs from product requests, benchmarking, and innovation through design thinking. To walk you through a typical design process:</p><ul><li>We work on user data and interviews to conduct our initial user research.</li><li>We ideate and generate ideas that we then prototype.</li><li>We test by users.</li></ul><p>We iterate until the right product perfectly matches our goal, before handing it over to our engineering team to implement. My team is responsible for running this process with their team and my role is to coach them, and guide them towards excellence for our users.</p><h3>PayFit: A Customer-Oriented Scaleup</h3><p>As a manager I must bounce between organizing short-term actions and driving our long-term vision. And I must keep the endgame in mind, so we all know where we’re heading. This requires breathing customer feedback, shadowing customer calls, tickets, user testing and metrics analysis. We need to be challenging ourselves regularly: are we prioritizing the right steps? We work together between designers with regular debriefs or through workshops with our peers and customers directly. I regularly review my team’s designs and make sure this is the level of quality we want to deliver for our customers. I also work with Product Management and Engineering to define our 12-month roadmap.</p><p>What I do today is in line with my studies in design school and my first jobs in physical products design, packaging, branding and so on… But the objects we all use in our day-to-day life are increasingly digital and tech products. Most of what we do imply using some screen or interface. Technology has become an intricate part of our lives and the role and importance of designers are growing increasingly. Design must offer the final user the best experience possible, just like it was for physical products when I was growing up. &nbsp; In the end, it’s just a change in medium, but tech and interface design is a huge part of the way we interact with businesses every day.</p><p>It feels like I’ve already lived many lives at PayFit in the course of four years! We’ve grown fast and every semester we need to pivot. That’s the most exciting part. Payroll is our lifeline and, like a heartbeat, it tells us every month how our customers handle our product and how employees experience payroll. We see opportunities for improvement and we change constantly. Thanks to low-code, we can ship improvements constantly, while also seeing how to iterate on more standardized components.&nbsp;</p><p>Our designers must find ways to improve customer autonomy by enhancing the overall user experience. I’m very proud when we succeed in helping our customers correct errors, ‘on their own’. Whether it’s reducing the number of clicks, increasing conversion through a funnel, reducing ticket creation, it all counts. Thanks to design and tools like, it’s easy to prototype and see how an idea can become a reality. And that even before having to implement a single line of code. This allows us to deliver the right solution faster, while saving time and money.</p><h2>PayFit company’s culture empowers women</h2><p>We recently launched our first female mentoring pilot program. It was sort of a custom side project that I did with our DE&amp;I manager, but it grew tremendously and has become a huge commitment at PayFit.</p><h3>Mentoring our future female leaders</h3><p>We thought we needed to find solutions to offer more opportunities to women in the company. As a startup is in hyper-growth mode, we learn on the battlefield, as we go! The pace can feel a bit overwhelming, especially for women, who’re prone to imposter syndrome when dealing with the unknown. We wanted to find the right system to support and challenge them in their career development.&nbsp;</p><p>So I was asked to implement the mentoring program within the company. We’d already experimented with this for all employees, but we really wanted to develop something dedicated to our potential up-and-coming female leaders. Our pilot program has twenty mentees and as many mentors. The mentors are women, and men, in leadership positions, making it a fantastic program. The main objectives are:</p><ul><li>Identifying top talents</li><li>Supporting their career development</li><li>Ensuring the retention of these key profiles</li></ul><p>As a good part of our mentors are men, a fourth goal may be to encourage their empathy towards their women mentees, and women in the workforce in general: they give them a male perspective while helping them build their careers and reach leadership positions. Yes, it’s still a work in progress but we’ve already had excellent results and some really positive feedback from our mentees.</p><p>There’s still a lot to do, but I can see that the work field is becoming more and more balanced. Working conditions today are much more flexible and favorable to women. It makes it much easier to combine professional goals and a personal life. Like, ten years ago, working from home a great time of the week was simply inconceivable, and now, that’s just commonplace! As a woman and a parent myself, I can attest to this…</p><h3>Women Empowerment: One-Step Forward, Two-Step Back?</h3><p>Companies have greatly developed policies aimed at women and parents: more services, mental health programs, parental support … all things that are fairly new and have changed everyone’s lives. At least, that’s what I see daily at PayFit. PayFit is very supportive of my career progression and open to new ideas or moves. It may have a lot to do with the startup culture here: we’re always pivoting, the organization of work is constantly evolving, and these are great times for women to step into new roles in the company. And I love to see the support of my company’s leadership towards women and bringing more and more responsibilities to female managers.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>Yet, in my opinion, women keep struggling because of educational biases. Even in today’s modern, open-minded households where partners are truly equals, little girls keep internalizing incredible stereotypes. Girls learn gender bias right in the school’s playground! This is where it all begins… As parents, we must teach them that they’re as strong and powerful as their male comrades from the earliest age, because this infamous imposter syndrome is built into girls from early childhood and we must break it as early as possible. Men rarely show signs of this syndrome because they’re taught to be confident early on. We must teach our daughters, and our sons too. Even though we see an increase in the number of young women in tech schools, there’s still a long road ahead. Perhaps ten years from now, we’ll truly see a real shift in tech companies, as female students enter the workforce. There will be a tipping point, but we’re not there yet today.<br>Women have a lot to contribute. They’re often more in tune with their intuition, provided they let it speak. I wasn’t always like that: when you begin, you tend to doubt a lot. I’ve gained confidence, of course. We must use our emotional intelligence because thanks to it, we have strong intuitions about the right path to take and what to do. That’s a real strength and women have galore of it.</p><h2>The Way Ahead for Tech … and I&nbsp;</h2><p>Over the years, I’ve learned that regardless of gender, we should always speak up. That’s one thing I’d change about myself, looking back. We’re all at risk of feeling like an imposter, fearing that people will find out we don’t have all the answers and lose respect… I’d also learn a lot more on mentors. I discovered mentoring later in my career, once I became a mum. It’s such a great way to grow professionally! In retrospect, I know that some people I met along the way were true mentors, although I didn’t realize it. But today’s formal programs allow women to ask for mentorship proactively, to reach out to talented male colleagues formally, and that’s an undeniable plus. You know, people are always looking to give back, just ask and you’ll see.</p><p>I’ve developed strong adaptability and flexibility skills. No two projects are the same and I never use the same method to achieve the results I want. In my field as many others, we must always keep in the know, stay connected with today’s industry; things are moving so fast, you don’t want to become obsolete. You may think that you don’t have time: make the time… I’ve also muscled up my listening skills too, to better understand my team’s needs. Sometimes, it’s not what they say, it’s how they say it… Team cohesion depends on management developing strong relationships and trust with all.</p><h3>Five years From Now</h3><p>I’ll be bold: I’d love to launch my own entrepreneur’s project. I’ve been toying with this more and more, lately. Who knows if I’ll be able to achieve this within five years, but yes, entrepreneurship is on my radar! I want to find the right idea before taking such a leap of faith! Designing, creating products and bringing an idea to life is what excites me daily. I will invent my own product one day, I know it. I’ve just not decided what it will be yet. History is in the making, for me…</p>

Eleonore de Lusignan at PayFit: Designing a Payroll for Tomorrow

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