EMPLOYEE BONUSES
Send bonuses in minutes, with clean invoicing for the company and an obvious, low-friction experience for employees—on a path to banking from day one.
/// We turned a manual, OTC process into a bonus disbursement mechanism that benefits companies (control, invoicing, compliance) and employees (simple activation, immediate use, path to banked rails). We defined an MVP around bulk/individual send, pre-disbursement review, auto-account creation via phone number, and legal acceptance by category (e.g., food). The feature shipped behind feature flags, and the architecture was designed to plug into the platform vision (cash-out and debit card) without rework. Result: very high adoption, the end of manual sends, 5 new clients, and +$250k ARR.
Role: Product Manager & End-to-End Designer (0→1)
Owned problem framing & MVP scope with success metrics (activation, adoption, time-to-value, cost per disbursement).
Aligned stakeholders across enterprise clients, Sales/Ops, Legal/Compliance, Finance, and Engineering; drove decisions and trade-offs.
Authored the PRD, service blueprint, and flows (employer funding → bulk/one-off grants → recipient acceptance → spend controls → reporting & billing).
Designed the E2E UX (web/mobile, issuer & employee), including edge cases, legal acceptance, and “no-account” auto-provisioning.
Defined payment/orchestration strategy: providers, fees/FX, reconciliation & payout rules; informed vendor SLAs.
Set instrumentation (Mixpanel/Metabase): event schema, dashboards, and alerting for adoption/TTV/failed steps.
Drove delivery with engineering: backlog, specs, states, feature flags, rollout plan, and canary checks.
Handoff & quality: detailed specs, UI kit updates, QA/UAT coordination, CS enablement, and release notes.
Post-launch: monitoring, experiment backlog, and continuous iteration on friction/throughput.
/// Companies wanted to pay bonuses quickly and cleanly, but the real flow was fragmented: spreadsheets, emails, manual reconciliations, low traceability. We interviewed ~10 companies to map the end-to-end journey. With that base, Legal made it clear we had only half the story: we also needed company invoicing, the employee’s explicit legal receipt/acceptance of category-restricted funds, and a design that fits the platform vision (future cash-out + debit card). We rewrote the first flow to incorporate legal, tax, and operational requirements—arriving at an MVP that serves the business today and opens the door for tomorrow’s platform.
problem
/// Companies were losing time and control with manual bonus disbursements, and employees lacked a simple path to receive and use funds (or move toward being banked). Without clear invoicing and legal acceptance of the bonus’s intended category, there was operational/tax risk and a poor experience.
1) Feature-flagged enablement
“Bonuses” appears only when enabled per company—safe rollout and clean controls.
2) Bulk and individual send
Upload via Tikin standard template (now) or single entry. Roadmap: flexible parsing to accept “almost any format.”
3) Pre-disbursement review
Clear summary before sending: beneficiaries, amounts, totals, fees, and bonus category. Fix errors before funds move.
4) Auto account via phone number (minimal friction)
We pre-create the account with the mobile number. On first login, the employee completes registration and sees the bonus.
5) Legal acceptance by category
Employee accepts and declares the intended category (e.g., food). This unlocks use and keeps us compliant.
6) Company invoicing & accounting
Invoices and documents ready for finance; disbursement reports by cut/period for audits and accounting.
7) Architecture ready for the vision
Flows and data modeled to plug cash-out and debit card without redesigning the core journey.
8) Measurement wired in
Events in Mixpanel/Metabase: upload → review → disburse → accept → use, with error alerts and stage timings to spot bottlenecks.
