Year
Disciplines
Human interface design
Interaction design
Design systems
Research
Product strategy
Art direction
Managers only spend
22 minutes
using Roster each week
Post coming soon
Amazon has been using the spreadsheet to manage headcount since 1994, when Jeff Bezos was in his garage.
As he hires his first employees, he manually writes their names, salaries, and job titles in a spreadsheet. And so it’s been for over two decades. With each manager, a new spreadsheet, shared between business and finance partners.
While viewing HR models, I found a correlation between hiring habits and the cost of regretted attrition. Money spent on talent that they want to keep, but inevitably lose.
Feedback from employees who leave shows a clear pattern of poor talent development, workload, and ultimately mis-leveling.
Managers I spoke with mention these issues, sharing stories of how they lost high-performers because another manager over-hired, preventing them from promoting deserving team members to balance an organization’s spending.
We use this chart to measure our problems through two distinct lenses:
How important is this to the experience that the humans involved have and what is the impact on that experience?
If we create a central tool to manage headcount that allows organizations to enforce guardrails on, and reliably track, their hiring budget , then it will remove the administrative burden from managers and deter over-hiring.
We distill down our questions to create a shared tether for our team to design, discuss, conduct technical discovery, prototype different ideas, etc.
By doing so, everyone working on this is progressing in the same direction and exposing more nuanced questions and assumptions that follow that direction.
Starting to hire is fast and easy to understand?
Managers feel confident they have the right information to take action?
Managers effortlessly stay within their organization’s budget for hiring?
Organizations quickly and easily create rules to align hiring with the budget?
We need to understand what our characters would expect in an ideal world. We can use our driving questions to do this. For example:
Organizations using Roster hire within 5% of their budget
Managers spend 90 minutes or less a week managing headcount
Onboard 25% of Amazon + AWS
New mental model
We landed on a simpler mental model, retaining focus on the end goal of hiring within budget.
Prototyping
Know what positions are left to hire, which to start hiring for first, and quickly get specific when needed.
Creating a job post has never been easier. By using available data from across Amazon, we can fill out most details on behalf of a manager.
