When Bambee came to us, they didn’t have a product—they had a vision. The founder had a bold idea: to reinvent how small businesses access HR by pairing real human experts with smart, intuitive software. But there was nothing on screen yet—no product, no UI, no roadmap. Just urgency, ambition, and a market ready for change. We came in to turn that zero into one. From the earliest interface sketches to the first line of production code, we helped bring the future of outsourced HR to life—and made sure it could grow.
Market & Context
In 2017, small–business HR was at a breaking point. Founders wore a dozen hats—managing hiring, performance reviews, benefits, compliance—often learning through costly trial and error. At the same time, the regulatory landscape tightened: evolving laws around pay equity, harassment, payroll taxes, and even marijuana compliance meant that even the tiniest of teams faced real legal exposure. SMBs were beginning to embrace remote and flexible work models, pushing HR practices to keep pace. Meanwhile, outsourcing HR became a go-to strategy: SMBs turned to PEOs and HR‑as‑a‑service to fill the expertise gap, but most solutions were clunky, outdated, and far from user‑friendly—especially on mobile. Against this backdrop, there was a clear moment for change: small businesses craved affordable, compliant, and intuitive HR tools and support. That’s exactly where Bambee entered—designing not just software, but a smarter, more caring way to do HR.
Brand & Product Limitations
The brand was strong and the vision was clear, but the early product direction struggled to meet the depth required by real-world HR workflows. Our initial designs, shaped closely with the founder, leaned toward minimalism and light-touch features. It looked great, but in practice, the tools weren’t robust enough. Compliance, coaching, documentation—these demanded weight, structure, and data density. We realized quickly that the product needed to go deeper. What we were building wasn’t just for startups. It had to scale with businesses that had real complexity.
Strategic & Technical Barriers
We were building in the deep end. There was no design system—just raw Figma files and a growing backlog. Internally, the team lacked front-end expertise, so our design work had to be both opinionated and implementable without friction. The data model evolved constantly as the product matured, making feature planning and interface consistency an ongoing challenge. The user base was growing, fast. Expectations were high, and timelines were tight. With startup momentum came startup chaos, and we had to deliver clarity in the middle of it.
Human & Organizational Challenges
On the human side, things were just as intense. The founder was visionary, but moved quickly and instinctively. Product priorities shifted with each new insight, idea, or user story. We’d design one feature and be asked to prototype a completely new flow the next day. There was no shortage of passion—only alignment. It wasn’t dysfunction. It was creative intensity at full tilt. Our role was to act as a stabilizing force. We had to extract patterns from the chaos, and keep the product moving forward without losing momentum.
Discovery & Strategy
We started by grounding ourselves in Bambee’s values and the founder’s vision. This wasn’t just another HR tool. It was a philosophical shift. The goal was clarity, trust, and control in a space that typically feels bureaucratic and confusing. Our first move was a lean but focused strategy sprint: aligning the team, mapping core workflows like compliance reviews and employee coaching, and identifying the most urgent use cases for launch. From the beginning, we knew we were designing for trust, not just usability.
Concept Development
Rather than chase feature parity with enterprise HR software, we focused on delivering emotional clarity. We leaned into a service-forward metaphor. Every screen had to feel like you were talking to your dedicated HR manager, not filling out a form. But as we learned from early prototypes, simplicity had to be balanced with density. We evolved the UI from sparse and decorative to layered and functional. The concept was human systems, not dashboards. Intelligent enough for compliance. Warm enough to coach.
Design Execution
We created a bold yet minimal visual system, one that could scale from policy creation to employee feedback to government audits, all while staying grounded in calm, confident design. Modular components allowed us to iterate rapidly, and a foundational grid made sure every new feature had a home. We balanced dense information with thoughtful whitespace, creating a sense of precision without overwhelming the user. Every pixel had a job to do.
Build & Integration
Though we weren’t responsible for code, we worked hand-in-hand with Bambee’s engineering team, delivering Figma files with atomic consistency and zero guesswork. Each component was spec’d with implementation clarity in mind—from hover states to empty states to error paths. Our goal was to make front-end implementation feel inevitable. In the absence of a design system, we became one.
Collaboration & Workflow
Speed mattered. We worked in two-week sprints, often pushing new designs daily. With engineering based in LA and product leadership moving quickly, we stayed async by default but aligned in bursts. We built fast, reviewed fast, and iterated live. Feedback was sharp, expectations were high, and alignment was critical. We became an extension of the founding team—trusted to ship, trusted to challenge, trusted to own.
The product we helped build became the foundation of Bambee’s platform. It brought the founder’s vision to life in a way that was not only usable, but trusted by the small businesses who needed it most. Internally, it gave the team a shared language and design structure that could scale. Externally, it gave customers something they’d never seen before: HR that felt as human as it was powerful. From compliance workflows to real-time coaching, everything clicked into place. The UI didn’t just work—it worked in service of something bigger.
Bambee used that early momentum to scale fast. New products followed. Fundraising accelerated. The team grew. What started as a raw idea became a category-defining HR experience. We weren’t just delivering design assets. We were helping unlock the company’s next phase of growth. The product became a sales tool, a cultural rally point, and a strategic multiplier.
At Metamodern, we thrive in the early moments—the ones with no map, no process, just a big idea and a need to get it right. If you’re building something from scratch and need it to matter fast, we’re the team you call.
From napkin sketch to category leader, we designed the spark that scaled.
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(2010-2025)
