Paylocity’s Product Principles

As product people, we make a ton of product decisions every day, both big and small. But what’s guiding us in making those decisions? How do we make sure we can move faster but still make sound decisions for our customers and our company?

Paylocity has five overarching values that reflect our company culture and shape our product practices. My favorite is Growth Fuels Opportunity, which I have seen in action at Paylocity over and over. As a high growth company, we’re constantly hiring new talent, promoting existing employees, and finding ways for people to grow their skills by moving into new teams and projects.

But to help us bring value to our customers, we’ve created product principles that will inform and guide all our product decisions. These principles will be the foundation for our decision-making process and will empower us to move quickly and with confidence. Product folks will use our principles to resolve everyday tensions, and inform trade-off decisions, while using the same process across the product org.

At Paylocity, our North Star is to delight 20 million lives every month by providing them with a modern employee experience. Our product principles are aligned with our North Star and help us make product decisions. They’ll also help us create an aligned approach to how we go to market with our solutions. They bring our North Star to life by making it clear why we’re building something and how we are going to build it.

Our Product Principles:

Make employees’ lives better

We put our customers’ employees first. We believe providing modern experiences built around employee needs is the key to solving our customers’ problems.

Think big, start small

We are clear about the customer problem we want to solve and the opportunity it presents to the business, and we build our long-term plan around that. We design an ideal experience, then work backwards to the MVP.

Simple, but significant

We care about our users’ time and engagement, so we simplify to make things easy for them. We can do this in many ways like embedding best practices, seeking to eliminate complexity in processes, and leveraging automated recommendations, making it easy to do everyday tasks.

Opinions based on facts

We are opinionated and make decisions using both quantitative and qualitative evidence to support our opinions. We continuously seek to better understand what our customers want and what the market looks like. We develop a strong point of view that allows us to tell a compelling story to stakeholders that is backed by data.

Focus on outcomes

We drive outcomes that provide the most value for our customers and Paylocity. We document our decisions, are transparent about the why behind them, and seek feedback to optimize the outcome.

These principles aren’t set in stone. We’ll reevaluate them and challenge them, just like we do with our product strategy. And when we need to, we’ll change them. The principles will evolve over time as our product organization, product, and company evolves. These principles will help us move faster and give us time to focus on bigger and innovative ideas, helping us keep Paylocity in high growth mode for years to come.

Thank you to the following Paylocity product leaders and others who laid the foundation of the Paylocity product principles:

· Amy Giulioni

· Heather Stoddard

· Jen Kuhs

· Kristin Vroman