Role
Senior UX / Product DesignerResearch → UI
Hiring ran on email threads and spreadsheets.
No standard workflow, no real-time visibility, no reliable audit trail. Hiring slowed, accountability blurred, and governance, delegation, and reporting were all manual.
Visibility
“Where is my request?”
Managers chased approvers over email with no view of where a request was stuck.
Governance
Rules easy to bypass
The hierarchy was tracked by hand; self-approval and skipped levels went unnoticed.
Continuity
Absences stalled everything
No way to delegate or reassign without breaking the chain.
One governed path from request to recruitment.
REQUEST
Hiring Manager
FTE or Contract
→
APPROVE
Director → Sr Director
First gates
→
GOVERN
VP → Group Head → SVP
Budget & plan
→
HANDOFF
HR Business Partner
Starts recruitment
The chain adapts to the requester's designation, skipping their own level so no one approves their own request.
Six roles, one chain, very different needs.
I mapped every role in the approval chain as a persona. Each has a different job in the same request, so each needs its own view.
Initiates
Hiring Manager
Goal: Fill roles fast, track every request.
Friction: Chasing approvers; no status view.
Needs: Guided form, live tracking, My Insights.
First approval
Director
Goal: Decide quickly; keep things moving when away.
Friction: Incomplete requests; stalls during absence.
Needs: Full-context queue, delegation, team view.
Oversees Directors
Senior Director
Goal: Align hires with budget and headcount.
Friction: Cumulative impact hard to weigh.
Needs: Aggregated Team Insights, reassignment.
Division lead
Vice President
Goal: Govern hiring against plan.
Friction: No single view of volume and spend.
Needs: Roll-up insights, enforced rules.
Near-final approval
Group Head / SVP
Goal: Steer org-wide hiring strategy.
Friction: No trend view; audit gaps.
Needs: Organization Insights, full audit trail.
Receives handoff
HR Business Partner
Goal: Recruit on complete, approved requests.
Friction: Missing approvals; unclear delegation.
Needs: Auto-handoff with “approved by X on behalf of Y”.
Research turned into 16 use cases across three pillars.
A
Core request & approval
Raise, route, review, and track in real time — with self-approval skipping, automatic HRBP handoff, and a complete audit trail.
B
Team management & delegation
Leads manage members, reassign in-flight requests, and delegate approval authority for a set period — without breaking governance.
C
Layered insights
My Insights for individuals, Team Insights for leads, Organization Insights for executives — volume, cycle time, bottlenecks, and budget vs. plan.
One table shows position, department, level, FTE or contract type, funding, the current approver, and live status — so no one has to chase an email thread to know where a request stands.
What the tool is built to deliver.
Speed
Faster turnaround
Structured routing and delegation remove email chasing and absence stalls.
Control
Governance by default
Hierarchy and self-approval rules enforced by the system, not by memory.
Compliance
Audit-ready history
Every approval, comment, and delegation timestamped and searchable.
Insight
Budget visibility
Headcount and spend vs. allocation, visible from team to org level.
What I'd carry forward.
What worked
- Mapping personas to steps in the chain made gaps obvious — delegation and HRBP handoff surfaced from research, not requirements.
- Writing problem statements per role kept scope honest when the brief expanded to teams and insights.
Key learnings
- In approval tools, the edge cases — absence, self-approval, on-behalf actions — are the product.
- Insights need layers: the same data answers different questions for a manager and an SVP.