Until recently star employees have been recognized for their accomplishments in a form that is either symbolic (a plaque) and/or monetary (a gift card). Neither one creates a memorable experience beyond the day that the gift was given. Blueboard wanted to change that. Founded by two best friends in the Bay Area (SF), they created a platform which allows employers to distribute experiential rewards to their very best employees. Rather than buying groceries and petrol with the gift card, why not go jump out of a plane instead?

As Blueboard started gaining more awareness and momentum in their brand and value proposition, they attracted the attention of what would have been the perfect company that epitomized their brand and values: GoPro. Unfortunately, their reward distribution platform was no where near the enterprise-grade level that was required to accommodate a company as large and complex as GoPro. Just the hierarchy of roles alone (think management layers) proved to be a difficult obstacle to overcome due to the platform's existing infrastructure. So rather than trying change what came before, the founders decided to design and rebuild it from scratch, much like their marketing site and employee redemption web app.

The good news was GoPro provided us with a well-thought-out user flow and a set of requirements which helped limit the scope. The bad news was their challenging set of requirements given the ambitious timeline and the limited resources we had at the time (a very nimble product team). Our brief: to create a reward distribution platform that accommodates a multi-level approval process and enables managers to make better decisions with insight into a reward's lifecycle.

The primary challenge also shaped the overall structure of the platform, specifically around the reward approval process within the corporate hierarchy. To fully accommodate the intricacies that were required by the different personas/roles, we spent a lot of time working with the GoPro team to better understand how they operated from beyond just a reward distribution standpoint. We carefully mapped out both common use cases and edge cases for each type of manager and designed a workflow that could help them achieve their goal.

We mocked up a series of wireframes and applied appropriate feedback to each iteration as we received them. One of the challenges was addressing some edge cases without sacrificing the usability for the majority. To overcome this, we drew up a wireframe for every possible use case to avoid any oversight.

In the end, we were able to deliver a platform that not only satisfied their initial set of requirements, but also built it in a scalable way to future-proof new ones. They were delighted by the end product so much so that they've provided many valuable referrals and testimonials for Blueboard time and time again. GoPro remains to be one of Blueboard's marquee clients years after their initial partnership.