Why did this project start?

Compensation was hard to see from both sides:

• For the worker: No single place to get a full picture of their compensation (salary band, where they sit in it etc.).

• For the client (admin): Had to manually source the data from different places to answer each employee's salary questions.

What set the clock was the EU Pay Transparency Directive. Employers have to show pay data by June 2026 and Deel had nothing native for this.

Key challenges

It looks like a simple page; the data behind it isn't

• A worker can hold more than one role, so which salary band do you show?

• People are often paid in a currency other than the organization's, so which currency does the page speak in?

• Past pay was calculated at exchange rates on that day, but we don't store those exchange rates. So what rate was used?

• Some counties speak of compensation in monthly values and others annual, so what to display here?

A legal deadline we couldn't move

• The whole project had to be shipped in 3 weeks, which meant I had to design for 2 user types (worker view and admin setup) within 1 week.

• I leveraged AI to build prototypes directly from front-end components, to faciliate team velocity.

• I also set expectations early with stakeholders that we'd ship a lean MVP first and iterate after the EU deadline.

The solution (V1)

Pay made visible, with the employer in control: V1 gave workers a clear view of their own pay to meet the EU transparency laws, and gave employers full control over what that view shows.

User type 1: The worker

One page that pulls together scattered pay data: compensation breakdown, job profile, average salary by gender, and the employee's salary band and position within it.

User type 2: The admin (employer)

Key research finding: customers want control, not automation.

• We expected customers to want us to auto-configure the portal from each country's rules and switch it on in one click.

• I ran interviews to test that assumption and heard the opposite. Pay is sensitive, so employers want to decide exactly what they show. Building for their control also kept us out of a brittle per-country rules engine we'd have had to maintain forever.

Result: one flow to configure the portal by country, worker type, or employment type, choose what to show, and preview before publishing.

Designing for edge cases

Most of the work on the worker side was in the data, not the layout: pulling every figure reliably, and handling the cases where it is thin or missing.

Trade-offs

• One currency for V1: everything in the organization's currency for a consistent view. A worker-facing currency selector is scoped for later.

• Desktop first, native mobile later: the deadline didn't allow a native mobile experience at the quality bar I wanted.

V2: Scaling the portal

V1 shipped on the EU deadline with a real marketing push, and the feedback was strongly positive from both leadership and customers. Companies that had never bought the Compensation Management add-on started asking for the portal too.

How I expanded the product to reach all our customers

• In V1 the portal lived inside the Compensation Management product, so only companies that had bought the add-on ever saw it.

• I pulled the portal out of the gated area and combined it with existing contract data to create a single view for anything compensation-related.

On mobile: The portal was added to the native mobile app (deferred in V1), so workers can now see their pay on the go.

Designing for different permission levels

Showing pay to managers needs strict permission management and I designed what the portal shows for 2 additional permission levels: no comp access and current pay only (no history).

How I drove cross-sell revenue

Everyone sees the portal with their basic compensation data. Companies without the add-on see a working version with the bands missing, so the value of buying is visible rather than described.

A/B testing planned for Q4 2026 to optimise the upselling content.

Improving the product through user interviews

Interviews surfaced several improvements. One example: making compensation progression readable.

• In V1, it was a bar chart, and users couldn't tell how a mid-year pay change was treated. Prorated or annualized?

• In V2, I put the date of each change on the x-axis and switched to a stacked area chart, so it reads as "on this date, your pay became this." That also resolved a backend modeling problem.

V3: Adding delight

A promotion is one of the best moments in someone's working life, and the product delivered it like any other notification. I saw an opportunity to make this moment worth celebrating: an envelope that opens to reveal the raise.

How I got my idea greenlit in one day using AI

• Implementing it meant convincing stakeholders to spend engineering time on something that looked like a nice-to-have.

• Instead of slides, I vibe-coded a working prototype in a day and shared a live link. People experienced the envelope reveal themselves, and that won the buy-in to ship it.

Bonus: You can also see the other concept I pitched (Polaroid)

Impact

• I took a compliance-forced MVP and turned it into an org-wide growth surface with in-context cross-sell, plus a flagship delight moment.

• 3 weeks from first concept to full rollout, in time for the EU Pay Transparency Directive deadline. Directly building the prototype with real Deel front-end is what made that pace possible.

• Early data shows an increase in adoption across all org sizes, currently at 3000+ unique visitors per week.