Designing Insightful Compensation Tools

Empowering startups with the tools to transition from messy spreadsheets to clear, confident compensation decisions.

  • My Role

    As Product Designer, I worked closely with Design Leadership to conduct thorough research and led design solution implementation.

  • Key Skills

    User Research and Analysis, Workshop Participation, Concept Testing, Cross-functional Collaboration, Prototyping, UI/UX Design

  • Team

    Collaborated closely with Product, Engineering, Design Leadership and Product Marketing teams

  • Timeline

    2023-2024

Background

Carta helps companies manage their equity ownership through their financial technology platform. Recognizing that companies compete for talent with both cash and equity, Carta expanded beyond equity management to launch Carta Total Compensation (CTC). The platform leverages Carta's extensive equity dataset, offering real-time data alongside market compensation benchmarks to help companies make informed decisions.

The Challenge

The market was already saturated with compensation tools, from established players like Radford to emerging competitors like Pave, CTC needed to find its unique position.

Before building new features, we needed to take a step back and answer fundamental questions such as: How do companies make compensation decisions? What unique value could Carta provide beyond market data? When and why do companies need structured compensation tools? How do compensation needs evolve as companies grow?

Research

Understand the Market

Product Marketing conducted extensive market analysis to understand where CTC sat within the competitive landscape. The team evaluated established players, analyzing their offerings, market positioning, and target segments. This analysis revealed an underserved opportunity in the small and mid-market segment, where companies needed sophisticated compensation tools but found enterprise solutions overwhelming.

“A material raise changes the game, before that the focus is on growth and revenue.” - Carta Customer

Understand User Needs

Design led customer interviews across various company stages to understand how businesses really approach compensation planning. We uncovered a crucial insight: there's a significant shift in compensation needs after Series A funding, where companies were actively seeking more structured compensation solutions.

Test Hypotheses

Using low-fidelity sacrificial concepts as research tools, I tested different approaches to helping companies analyze compensation data. Through user feedback sessions, we validated a key opportunity: companies needed better ways to generate insights from their data without relying on external spreadsheets. This led us to focus on developing robust in-app reporting features and surfacing quick insights that would make compensation data more immediately actionable.

The Impact

Data-Driven Insights

We transformed complex compensation data into actionable insights through a compensation summary report. By combining market benchmarks with company-specific data, we surfaced key trends and anomalies that helped companies make informed decisions. This shift from raw data to meaningful insights helped companies understand their compensation positioning without relying on external analysis tools.

Improved Benchmark Experience

Recognizing that compensation data was CTC's most valuable asset, we elevated the benchmark experience to meet market expectations. The redesign focused on three key areas: improving search functionality to help users find relevant roles faster, creating a scalable interface to support continuous dataset growth, and refining filtering options to ensure data accuracy for specific company contexts.

Interactive Planning Tools

We developed an equity refresh planner that enabled real-time scenario planning. Instead of managing complex spreadsheets, companies could now model different refresh strategies and immediately see their downstream impact on equity pools and compensation structure. This interactive approach transformed theoretical data into a practical planning tool, empowering companies to make more confident decisions about equity distribution.

Reflection

This project taught me to navigate complex organizational dynamics while staying focused on user needs. Working under significant pressure from leadership and shifting strategic priorities, we had to balance the desire for quick wins with the need for thoughtful, long-term solutions. The compensation market was highly competitive, and there was constant pressure to match competitor features while also establishing our unique value proposition.

The most rewarding outcome was seeing our research-driven approach validated through user adoption. Despite the challenging environment, we created tools that genuinely helped companies make better compensation decisions, moving them from complex spreadsheets to confident, data-driven planning.