Peopleby Bento

Workforce management solution addressing organizational complexity for growing teams.

RoleProduct Designer

ClientBento Africa

Duration3 months

Year2020

Transforming manual HR administration into a streamlined, digital-first experience for the African workforce.

People by Bento is an all-in-one Human Resource Management (HRM) platform designed to automate the entire employee lifecycle, from hiring, onboarding, talent development and performance appraisals.

The platform streamlines complex People Operations through a high-performance interface that integrates essential administrative modules into a single ecosystem. By centralizing functions like Time & Attendance, Lifecycle Management, and Data-Driven Appraisals, the tool reduces administrative overhead and empowers organizations to shift from manual tracking to strategic workforce optimization.

Problem Definition & Research Findings

Through extensive stakeholder briefings and qualitative interviews with HR professionals and business leads, I identified a systemic friction point which is Administrative Fragmentation. Organizations were struggling with a "nightmare" of manual paperwork and disjointed spreadsheets, creating a burden that stalled company growth and made operations stressful.

The Core Challenges & Constraints

The Scalability Bottleneck: Managing large employee numbers without a centralized system leads to data silos and manual errors in critical areas like payroll and lifecycle tracking.
Performance Invisibility: Without an integrated appraisal and time-management framework, organizations lacked the visibility needed to monitor productivity and onboard employees effectively.
Cost & Complexity Barriers: Many available solutions were foreign-built tools that were either too expensive or failed to account for the dynamic, localized HR practices required in the Nigerian market.

Systemic Design Thinking for Scalable HR

Working with the design and product leads, I audited the initial MVP to transform manual "spreadsheet nightmares" into a unified, automated ecosystem. By integrating stakeholder feedback, we streamlined high-friction modules like payroll and performance tracking into an intuitive, scalable interface that delivers real-time organizational insights.

Dashboard: The Central Command Center

The Friction: HR leads lacked a unified view of organizational health, forced to hunt through disparate files for basic headcounts or upcoming activities.

My Approach: I designed a high-fidelity dashboard that aggregates real-time metrics, employee growth trends, department strength, and upcoming compliance and payroll milestones, into a single, scannable view.

Operational Benefit: Provides immediate administrative clarity and features a "Broadcast" function to eliminate communication silos across the company.

Employee Management: Humanizing Administrative Data

The Friction: Fragmented records made it nearly impossible to track nuanced employee data, leading to a "faceless" administrative experience and lost documentation.

My Approach: Working with the team, we built a comprehensive digital vault for every worker, from interns to full-time staff, centralizing leave history, appraisal records, and personal milestones.

Operational Benefit: Empowers HR to foster better workplace relationships through "human-level" data access while maintaining a rigorous audit trail.

Employee Management: Humanizing Administrative Data

Time Tracking & Shift Planning

The Problem: For organizations with multiple branches and large onsite workforces, manual clock-ins are vulnerable to "buddy punching" and inaccurate data, complicating payroll and shift management.

My Approach: To solve for data integrity, we integrated facial recognition software for secure clock-ins and developed a robust shift-planning dashboard to visualize workforce distribution across locations.

The Benefit: Automating attendance with biometrics tightens time-tracking accuracy to near-zero discrepancy, feeding cleaner data into the payroll engine and removing entire categories of manual reconciliation work.

Structuring a Custom Hiring Framework

The Problem: One-size-fits-all recruitment tools often fail to account for the unique interview stages and technical vetting required by different departments.

My Approach: I designed a modular "Job Creation" engine that allows HR to build custom hiring agendas, defining everything from initial phone screenings to specific technical tests and interview questions before a role ever goes live.

The Benefit: By productizing the "setup" phase, we ensure that every new opening has a clear, standardized roadmap, preventing administrative confusion and ensuring team alignment from the very start.

Hiring Process: Collaborative and Transparent Vetting

The Problem: Once applicants flood in, the "tricky part" begins, vetting becomes a bottleneck due to opaque feedback loops and the difficulty of tracking candidate movement across stages.

My Approach: We engineered a transparent "Candidate Pipeline" view where the hiring team can review CVs, drop comments for peer review, and move applicants through the pre-configured stages with a single click.

The Benefit: This collaborative vetting system eliminates data silos, allowing for real-time peer feedback and a structured "move to phone/test/hire" flow that accelerates final approvals and reduces candidate drop-off.

Hiring Process: Collaborative and Transparent Vetting

Employee Onboarding: Building a First-Day Experience

The Problem: Onboarding often lacked the structure needed to make a strong first impression, leaving new hires overwhelmed without clear guidance or the necessary tools for productivity.

The Approach: I designed a productized workflow that allows HR to instantly set up email accounts, assign hardware/software, and pair new hires with a "work buddy" to guide them through their initial stages.

The Benefit: This automated delivery of welcome videos, training manuals, and company handbooks ensures a professional, high-impact first day that sets the foundation for long-term employee engagement.

Employee Onboarding: Building a First-Day Experience

Performance Appraisals: Cultivating a High-Output Culture

The Problem: Traditional performance reviews are often subjective, infrequent, and disconnected from actual business goals, making it difficult for HR to objectively measure productivity.

My Approach: I architected a flexible appraisal framework that supports both 1:1 and 360-degree reviews, allowing leadership to assign specific KPIs and track progress against company-wide objectives.

The Benefit: By productizing the review cycle, the system transforms feedback into actionable data, ensuring employees remain aligned with organizational targets while identifying top-tier talent for growth.

Performance Appraisals: Cultivating a High-Output Culture

Leave Management: Streamlining Time-Off Governance

The Problem: Managing diverse leave types, from medical to emergency, manually often leads to staffing gaps, contract violations, and administrative overhead.

My Approach: We engineered an automated leave engine that tracks employee contracts in real-time, enforcing balance limits while providing a clear calendar view for HR to manage team availability.

The Benefit: This centralized system eliminates the risk of over-allocated time off and provides a frictionless approval flow, ensuring the organization remains adequately staffed even during peak vacation periods.

Leave Management: Streamlining Time-Off Governance

Final Reflections & Impact

Working on People by Bento was a masterclass in designing for high-stakes operational environments where efficiency is the primary currency. It challenged our team to transform a manual "spreadsheet nightmare" into a seamless, multi-national HR engine that balances rigid local labor laws with a fluid, intuitive user experience across a rapidly growing continent.

What the work moved

Multi-Market Adoption: Scaled the platform across four African markets, onboarding customer teams that spanned the long tail from twenty-person startups to multi-branch enterprises.
Operational Retention: Strong cohort health in the first quarter of deployment, with HR leads using payroll and onboarding day-to-day without needing a Notion runbook open beside them.
Systemic Efficiency: Cut the time-to-onboard a new hire materially, letting HR teams pivot from manual data entry to strategic talent development. The shipped outcomes are at the foot of this case study.

Key Takeaways

The ROI of Automation

I learned that in HR tech, value is measured by the removal of friction. By automating high-stress tasks like payroll and attendance, we directly increased employer confidence and platform stickiness.

Designing for Localized Complexity

Addressing the specific regulatory and cultural nuances of different African markets required moving beyond standard global templates. Integrating localized leave and appraisal patterns was a strategic necessity to ensure the tool was "market-ready".

Systemic Impact

This project transcends simple record-keeping. By centralizing employee data, we built a bridge for small and large enterprises to scale sustainably, directly contributing to more organized and productive workforces across the region.

HR leads ran payroll and onboarding without a Notion runbook open.

Measured and reported by the Bento team across the first six months of customer cohorts on the new product.

Three-figure

Customer teams across four African markets at six months, per the team's read.

Cut in half

Time to onboard a new hire end-to-end.

Top-tier

Customer health score across the first cohort.

HR tools fail when they try to be product platforms. This one succeeded by being a checklist with a brain. We resisted every dashboard urge and shipped a workflow.

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