The official employee newspaper
of Workpay Africa
of Workpay Africa
By Philomena Thuranira
Many employees have wondered what is in store for the Workpay product in 2024? Needless to say, Workpay's 2024 product roadmap charts a strategic course towards the company goal of profitability, growth and performance culture.
However, departing from the traditional yearly roadmap model, this year the Product Team will use quarterly roadmaps to enhance efficiency, making goals more manageable and progress easily measurable. The first quarter looks to be particularly impactful
The pivotal Q1 goal was the unification of the Local and Global systems. This has been a challenging and sometimes chaotic process, yet one that has highlighted the strength of Workpay’s Product, Engineering, Success, Support, and Payroll Teams. Their story of global migration is told in exciting detail in another article. Despite some major hiccups, the new unified system is already bringing operational efficiency and is set to enable truly global growth by facilitating expansion into other African markets. This efficient path to scale will in turn help Workpay pursue profitability.
Further product-led growth is expected from a slate of new features and modules in Q1, including:
The automation of EOR processes will be a long-term project, beginning but not ending in Q1. This project is driven by several factors. Firstly, it will enable Workpay to onboard more EOR customers and employees faster and more efficiently, eliminating manual tasks, paperwork, and back-and-forth communication that have typically characterized Workpay’s EOR onboarding experience. This efficiency will drive cost reductions per customer and employee, while enabling us to onboard more customers faster, driving revenue growth.
In keeping with Workpay’s commitment to performance, the technical teams will also be working to revamp existing modules in Q1, such as:
Onboarding is particularly critical. The goal is to enable new clients and employees to onboard themselves. This will empower the Business Team to target larger organizations with entities across multiple markets, even those where Workpay does not have teams on the ground. Seamless self-onboarding will ensure that these customers can centrally manage their system onboarding processes with reduced assistance. This further frees up critical Customer Success resources. Currently, the overwhelming majority of the Success Team’s time is focused on onboarding, rather than generating value through account management, upsells, cross-sells, and renewals. By flipping the balance, Customer Success can become a true engine of growth.
The success of the 2024 roadmap hinges on critical OKRs. Successful migration and stabilization of the product, adoption into the new global product, and a reduction in customer complaints are the key metrics. Comparisons with the previous year's complaints data will provide valuable insights into the roadmap's impact.
Workpay’s goals each quarter will be determined on the basis of a user-centric process that prioritizes customer needs. The collection of tickets related to bugs and feature requests, coupled with sessions involving the Customer Success and product Support teams. This customer-centric approach aligns company goals with customer expectations, fostering continuous improvement. However, strategic commercial considerations are equally important, such as the emergence of frontier technologies like AI, the actions of competitors in core markets, and the incumbent players in new international markets.
As always, Workpay’s technical teams also remain agile in order to respond to unexpected shifts in business requirements. One thing the team seeks to avoid this year based on lessons from the last is timeline spillover of goals from one quarter to the next. To prevent this, a significant buffer is built into the quarterly timeline, providing leeway for unforeseen circumstances.
Agility is also operationalized in the form of continuous reviews and reprioritizations to ensure the roadmap aligns with emerging needs. At the end of each quarter, the Product Team will review progress made on the last quarter’s roadmap and set new plans and OKRs for the coming quarter.
This commitment to adaptability, customer-centricity, and strategic planning is expected to put Workpay in the best possible position to successfully navigate and outpace the competition through the dynamic landscape of 2024.
