A custom HRM system, designed and built without a designer

Context

Gray Mines needed one internal system for running its people and its sales. I designed and built a custom one. On the HR side it covered payroll, company announcements and onboarding. It also included a CRM where the sales team entered every sale, a leaderboard showing how the team was doing, and the analysis of sales across the company.

My role

Product, design and engineering, with no dedicated designer. I decided what the system should do, designed the screens and built them, on Next.js and Node.js, deployed to AWS with CI/CD.

The problem

Internal tools usually fail quietly: people keep the spreadsheet open next to them. To be used, the system had to be easier than the workaround for the people doing the administration every day.

Key decisions

Design and build as one person

Without a designer, every screen was designed by the person who would build it. That removed handoff time and kept the scope honest. The risk is designing for the developer instead of the user, so the work had to start from how the administrators actually worked.

Ship it like a product, not a side project

It ran on AWS with a CI/CD pipeline, like customer-facing software. That’s more setup than an internal tool usually gets, and it meant fixes reached the people using it quickly.

Outcome

The system streamlined internal administration and improved productivity by about 40%.

Stack

Next.js, Node.js, AWS, CI/CD.