Zenefits
Background
Founded in 2013, Zenefits is a company that disrupted Human Resources. With over 10,000+ clients it has achieved ‘Unicorn’ status. In an industry that still relies on fax machines, Zenefits has revolutionized HR and Payroll. As a company they are incredibly passionate about delivering the best experience to their customers.
Innovation
Input
In term of input, Zenefits wants to obtain new ideas from different sources such as external or internal. With regards to external sources, Zenefits goes to their customers and interviews them in order to see what they want as well as to address any complaints that they might have. As for internal sources, Zenefits utilizes a tool called Waterfree in which anybody can put their ideas into this box with or without supporting data. They aren’t limited to using just an idea box, Zenefits also hosts internal hack-a-thons every quarter in which anybody in the company can participate in these competitions to come up with an innovative idea with a prototype. However, even though anybody can put their idea into Waterfree there isn’t any guarantee that the company will go through with that idea. If the data shows that the idea will fail or if there isn’t enough resources to greenlight the project, then the idea will be thrown out.
Process
Similar to Upwork, Zenefits does their development by the book , by practicing Scrum in 2 week sprints. Importantly all teams are required to maintain the products that they build. Innovation is focused around “long term bets, and short term debts”. Zenefits is building products for where they think the market will be, not where is currently is. Zenefits does not have a specific innovation team because they had one called ‘Mission Control’ and it failed – all teams are invited to innovate.
For Zenefits, the key measurements of success are based on both customer satisfaction and the profit of the company. Zenefits mentioned that a customer focus is important to retrieve feedback to improve their product. Also, they mentioned that “ROI is key!”. In a list, the measurements of success for Zenefits are:
- Customer-success matrix – focus on the feedback from customers/users
- Business-success matrix – focus on ROI and profit for the business
- Value added to product – customer value
- Sniff test – introduce the feature internally for a first evaluation and feedback on product or service
- Customer success-tracking, customer feedback
Output
They measurement of success for Zenefits could be seen as divided into two parts – the customer and the business part. Both parts are key for the company, but measured differently which makes it important to have different metrics to evaluate the whole part of a project. The clear cut between the business and customer part makes it simple to evaluate if a project is leaning towards one end, both parts are failing or both parts are successful. In other words, a project where the metrics show positive numbers, it will most likely be a successful implementation