What’s it like to work in product design at Paycom? We sat down with Jon, a team leader, to find out!
Where design meets opportunity
I didn’t start out as a product designer. I’ve been doing design for about 13 years, and I began my career working in agencies as a graphic designer.
But agency life? It’s grueling. There were nights and days when I felt like I never left the office, so I eventually transitioned into a startup role as an in-house designer. That’s when I had the chance to work in the UX/UI space and ended up loving it. I’ve been in the product world ever since.
A designer’s dream destination
Everything we build at Paycom is proprietary. That’s what first drew me in. We have the opportunity to work on a large product suite with a lot of different and interesting subproducts, and we do it all in-house.
As a designer, it’s an awesome and enticing thing to get the chance to make an impact on a product that is essentially your team’s vision.
But I also really like the people. I picked up on the synergy pretty quickly during my hiring process. I felt at home with those conversations, and I cannot speak highly enough of the people — even as I started my role.
Paycom hires really good people, not just from a competency standpoint but in the sense that the teams really gel. There is a strong culture of connectedness and collaboration within our design work.
The perfect storm of creativity and opportunity
As a team leader, I oversee several product designers. A big part of my job is to help facilitate incoming projects and manage the workload. And of course, I make sure that our solutions accurately tackle the issues at hand. But ultimately, I think the responsibility of a team leader is to help my people grow.
My team primarily provides support for projects within Paycom’s HR Management space, which includes our Affordable Care Act (ACA) software and 401(k) Reporting tool. We work within Figma to build out prototypes, and then we take those prototypes into a testing environment to gather insights with users who are similar to Paycom’s end-users.
We work closely with our product managers to help define the problem and write the requirements. Once we’ve gotten to a point where the designs are in what we call a “high-fidelity state,” we build out the specs and product requirement documents. These are basically the logic behind how the product is going to work, the problems we’re trying to solve and the acceptance criteria that we met.
Eventually, we hand it off to our development partners to build out. Then our involvement shifts to quality assurance (QA) and optimization.
Shaping the future of product design at Paycom
I first joined Paycom as a product designer, but I stepped into a leadership role pretty quickly. I’ve been at companies where professional development isn’t always valued, but that’s not the case here. Paycom does a really good job of promoting from within and looking for professional growth opportunities for its contributors. In a lot of cases, it sees a need and a skill set and tries to quickly get someone it believes in into the position. I’ve gotten a lot of awesome opportunities because of it, like leading projects of various sizes and continuing to grow my leadership.
At Paycom, product design is still something that’s fairly young. It presents a unique opportunity for designers to come into the organization and play a key role in shaping the future. If you want to be a part of that ground-up effort and help define the growth and maturation of product design at Paycom, apply today!
