Role: Founding Product Designer

Client: Cifra

Industry: Enterprise SaaS

Scope: Website, Web Application

Cifra is an enterprise goal-setting and performance management platform built to give organizations a unified way to track company goals, team KPIs, and individual tasks in one place. Every task ties to a KPI, every KPI ties to a goal, and every goal ties to the organization's broader strategy, so completing a task always moves something bigger forward.

Organizations typically had no clear line connecting leadership's strategic goals to the day-to-day work happening across teams. Without a shared system, teams could stay busy completing tasks and hitting KPIs without a clear view of whether that work was actually moving the company's real goals forward, making it hard for leadership to see genuine progress and for employees to understand how their work mattered beyond their own to-do list.

As founding product designer, I built the platform around a strict hierarchy, goals at the top, KPIs tied to those goals, and tasks tied to those KPIs, so progress at any level always reflects upward.

Role-based access shaped what each person could see and do, admins have full visibility across the organization, managers create and assign KPIs and manage their own team members, and employees track their assigned KPIs and manage personal tasks tied to them.

One of the key decisions was minimizing noise across the platform, keeping the experience simple and approachable for people at any level, rather than making it feel like a dense enterprise tool.

Whenever someone updates a task, that update reflects on the KPI it belongs to, and any KPI progress reflects on the goal it supports. Overdue tasks, KPIs, and goals are all tracked and flagged the same way, so nothing gets buried and everyone from an employee to the CEO can see exactly where things stand, without needing separate reports pulled together manually.

Rather than letting people post generic status updates, every update had to be tied to a specific goal. When someone shared progress, they selected the goal it related to and reported what had been completed and what remained, keeping every update anchored to a real business objective.

As an enterprise platform meant to enhance team productivity, Cifra needed to work alongside the tools organizations already used rather than existing in isolation. It integrates with communication, task management, and analytics tools including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Calendar, Asana, Jira, Trello, Google Analytics, Retool, and Metabase, syncing data between platforms so users can manage messages, meetings, schedules, and tasks without constantly switching between systems.

Rather than a passive tutorial, new users are walked through creating something real on their first visit, whether that's a goal, KPI, task, or update, so by the end of the walkthrough they've already made something functional rather than just having read about how the platform works.

Usability testing confirmed that the platform's flows were understandable and easy to use. Users specifically responded well to the onboarding walkthrough, saying it helped them get started without wondering what to do next, letting them get familiar with the platform quickly. The completed designs and assets were handed over for the next stage of the product which is development.