Helping Small Businesses Manage their Employees

Homebase’s mission is to kill paperwork for local business owners managing hourly employees. I joined in 2014 as employee #4 and Lead Designer in San Francisco, two years before the product was opened to the public. Homebase is now used by over 120,000 small businesses in the US.

Challenge

The paperwork and administration of hourly work is an unnecessary burden.  It’s causing headaches and uncertainty for millions of hard-working people, and it’s costing local business owners over a billion hours of wasted time every year.

In your local restaurant or retail shop, employees are likely getting their work schedule from a paper sheet on a wall the day before their week starts (if they’re lucky). Common conflicts like time-off, sick leave, or finding replacements for shifts are a general manager’s nightmare. Not to mention tracking employee hours, calculating tip pools, or correctly processing payroll on time.

Isn’t running your own business hard enough already?

Mission

Homebase’s mission is to bring free timesheets and schedules to everyone, and to kill this paperwork once and for all. It’s an all-in-one HR platform for businesses to manage their hourly employees.

It’s core functionality includes:

1. Time-clock and timesheets for tracking employees’ hours and reducing the time spent on preparing payroll
2. Schedule builder for managers to create and publish employees’ schedules online for everyone to see
3. Hiring platform for local businesses to post jobs and find candidates quickly
4. Team mobile apps for the whole team to stay coordinated and connected

My Role

In 2014, I joined a (then) tiny startup in SF. The next five years would be a huge adventure with a lot of personal learnings and growth. I was employee #4 and lead design as a single contributor for the first two years of the company. I designed most of the major core features of the web dashboard (Clover POS/First Data Integration, Quickbooks/Intuit for Payroll, Schedule Builder, Employee Timesheets, Sales/Labor Reporting) and the initial Time Clock / POS native apps on Android and iOS.

In 2016, I transitioned to a pure product manager role. As PM, I managed 9 engineers on the Core Experience and Growth teams working on Homebase’s most critical core features (Timesheets and Payroll, Scheduling, POS/Payroll Integrations). I lead major new initiatives of A/B tests on the web onboarding flow, the Ingenico, Square POS and ADP Payroll integrations, and the first go-to-market version of the Hiring product.

Day-to-day, I was responsible for planning my team’s part of the company roadmap with our cross-team PMs and VP of Product, prioritising and managing my team’s backlog (Scrum/Agile), product discovery with our Design team via customer conversations, and measuring and reporting on product success (Activation, Engagement, NPS, Churn) with Heap Analytics, FullStory, and SQL.