15mn case study:
Prior to your next conversation with the product team at Rippling, please take 30 minutes to
consider the following case and prepare to discuss the questions below.
Currently, Rippling administrators can change the attributes of one employee at a time (see
screenshot below).
However, many Rippling customers want to make changes that affect many people at once. We
call this a “bulk change”. For example, high-growth companies regularly make changes to their
organizational structure. Sometimes companies need to change compensation for many
employees at one time. Or perhaps the company opens a new office and needs to reassign a
set of people to the new office en masse.
As you’re thinking about the questions below, remember that Rippling is an interconnected
system: there is a single system of record at the core, a host of first-party products (such as
Payroll, Insurance and Benefits, and Device Management), and a broad swath of 3rd party
integrations (such as Slack, GSuite, and DoorDash).
Please be prepared to discuss the following questions from the perspective of the Product
Manager working on this “bulk change” capability. For the purpose of this discussion, you can
assume that this high-level feature has been greenlit for the team to work on.
● What is the basic flow that an administrator would need to follow in order to make a bulk
change?
● What are some potential solutions that would allow administrators to make these kinds
of bulk changes? If you were building the first version of this capability with limited time
and resources, which of those would you choose?
● What kinds of changes would you enable administrators to make?
● What are the most important considerations before committing a change?
Prompt for 1hr case review
Rippling Product Case Study
In your earlier product discussion with us you talked through some of the steps an administrator
would take to enact a bulk change in Rippling as well as some of the product approaches we
could take to implement that flow. This case study extends that conversation.
First, we’ll add three critical new assumptions to the prior document:
1. The bulk change capability should accommodate the needs of customers who may need
to make modifications to hundreds of employees at a time (though, of course, it could
still be used to make changes to a small number of employees).
2. Your solution must accommodate a scenario in which multiple attributes are changed
simultaneously and for which at least some of those attributes have different values per
employee. For example, coming out of an annual performance review cycle, employees
may have their cash compensation, title, and levels all change.
3. You do not need to consider the special cases of bulk onboarding and bulk termination,
which are special cases that are outside the scope of this exercise.
Please put together a short presentation or document that covers the following points:
1. Mock up the user experience for each of the key steps in the user journey and talk us
through why you made the choices you made in those mockups. (We don’t care about
your visual design skills; rough, hand-drawn mockups are more than okay. We do,
however, care deeply about how well you have thought through your choices.)
2. Given the product approaches that you’ve come up with, what criteria would you use to
choose your approach? Show how you would evaluate each of the potential approaches
against that criteria.
3. Discuss the challenges in propagating changed information to all of Rippling’s core
systems and to 3rd party systems. How important is it for us to propagate these
changes?
Do not spend time discussing processes, except as noted above.
You will spend about 30 to 45 minutes walking us through your prepared content, during which
time we’ll ask you questions about your proposal as well as other related topics. At the end we
should have time for you to ask us a few questions!
Thanks for investing the time in this case study. We’re looking forward to seeing what you put
together and having an active discussion!