People by Bento: The Modern Operating System for HR & Payroll

Taking away the complexities and the work overload that comes with managing an organizations workforce with spreadsheets and multiple files

People by Bento is an HR tool to help manage employees from hiring to onboarding, to talent management, to appraisals, to leave management, to separation, and much more...

People by bento get to provide this solution by giving an easy-to-use interface that comprises various nodules needed for proper employee management, this includes modules like time management, Employee management, Appraisal, Onboarding, and offboarding management.

Role

Product Designer

Client

bento africa

Duration

6 months

Year

2020

Website

bento.africa
Quick Read
Full Case Study

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, including employee growth trends, department strength, and critical October events, 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.

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 ensures 100% accuracy in time-tracking, directly feeding into the payroll engine to reduce manual reconciliation and operational leakages.

Stucturing 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.

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.

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.

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.

Solving the HR Nightmare at Scale

Managing human capital in high-growth environments has historically been a fragmented ordeal for African organizations. Before People by Bento, companies were trapped in a "nightmare" of manual paperwork, disjointed spreadsheets, and expensive foreign tools that failed to account for local market nuances.

Our mission was to build a comprehensive ecosystem that professionalizes the entire employee lifecycle, from strategic hiring and seamless onboarding to automated payroll, appraisals, and separation.

The Discovery Phase: Stakeholder Briefings

Upon joining the People by Bento project, I initiated a high-velocity discovery phase to align the product vision with real-world operational challenges. My primary objective was to decode the "why" behind the vision and ensure that every design decision balanced business goals with the practical needs of HR teams.
Multi-Channel Insight Gathering
  • Executive Alignment: I began with deep-dive briefings to understand the core mission of People, transforming HR from a administrative burden into a strategic asset.
  • Sales Intelligence: I conducted sessions with the sales team to capture the primary objections and pain points of current Bento Payroll users who were struggling to manage their broader organizational needs.
  • Support & Success Data: I collaborated with the support leads to review user request logs and open feedback channels, identifying the specific friction points that made manual management a "nightmare" for existing customers.
  • Engineering Feasibility: I concluded the phase with the engineering team to audit technical constraints and team capacity, ensuring our proposed solutions were both impactful and scalable.

Findings

Interviews with HR Professionals

Following my internal briefings, I interviewed three HR leads within the Nigerian market to understand the standard mode of operations before building a tool designed to ease those specific processes.
Core Findings
  • The Scalability Gap: Organizations with large employee numbers, particularly those with onsite workforces, were the most vocal about needing better ways to monitor performance and attendance.
  • The Alternative Vacuum: Organizations were ready to adopt a localized solution because existing foreign tools were prohibitively expensive and lacked the necessary context for the African market.

Competitive Gaps & Opportunities

I conducted a deep dive into foreign enterprise platforms to deconstruct their core functionalities while identifying the cultural and operational lapses such as high costs and rigid workflows that made them inaccessible to the African market. This research served as a critical benchmark, allowing us to architect a localized HR engine that bridged the gap between global-standard functionality.

How Might We: Defining the North Star

How might we transform fragmented administrative "nightmares" into a unified, high-velocity engine that scales with the unique operational needs of African organizations?

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, including employee growth trends, department strength, and critical October events, 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.

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 ensures 100% accuracy in time-tracking, directly feeding into the payroll engine to reduce manual reconciliation and operational leakages.

Stucturing 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
Key Performance Metrics & Scale
  • Massive Adoption: Successfully scaled the platform across 5 countries, supporting a user base of over 10 million employees and employers.
  • Operational Retention: Achieved an industry-leading adoption rate of 85% within the first quarter of deployment, while maintaining a remarkably low churn rate of less than 9%.
  • Systemic Efficiency: Reduced average administrative processing time by 60%, allowing HR teams to pivot from manual data entry to strategic talent development.

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.

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