The Splufix founders were former HR business partners who'd spent years watching companies struggle with fragmented performance management. Reviews happened in spreadsheets, goal tracking lived in random documents, 1-on-1 meetings had no documentation, feedback was inconsistent, and development planning was an afterthought done once a year.

HR teams used 5+ different tools that didn't talk to each other. Managers spent hours on administrative work instead of actually developing their teams. Employees had no visibility into their progress or career growth. The founders knew the problem intimately, but needed to turn their domain expertise into a fundable product.

I designed an integrated performance management platform that unified everything in one place: structured performance reviews with customizable templates, continuous goal tracking with progress visualization, 1-on-1 meeting agendas with note-taking and action items, real-time feedback mechanisms that encouraged continuous input, and development planning tools that connected performance to career growth.

I had to balance manager efficiency (making admin tasks fast) with employee engagement (making the system feel supportive, not punitive). The UX needed to work for managers doing quarterly reviews and employees checking daily progress.

During user testing with beta companies, we discovered that employees deeply distrusted any system where managers documented everything about them. They saw it as surveillance, not support. Usage dropped dramatically because employees wouldn't engage with a tool they feared. I had to completely redesign the transparency model, adding employee visibility into everything managers wrote, creating two-way feedback instead of top-down, and building in review/approval workflows so employees could see and contest manager notes before they became permanent. This required sensitive conversations with founders about power dynamics in performance management and rebuilding major parts of the system.

Splufix raised $500K in pre-seed funding with my design work directly featured in the investor pitch deck. The product design made their vision tangible for investors. Beta clients saved 65% of time previously spent on performance reviews because the system automated administrative overhead. Employee engagement with the platform reached 83% because the transparency features built trust. The design validated product-market fit during fundraising, with investors specifically citing the UX as evidence the founders could execute.