Tech & Innovation Blog
Roberto Masiero, SVP Innovation, talks about his journey from entrepreneurship to founding ADP’s first Innovation Labs.
Senior Leaders, Innovation, Career Journey
We decided to open the first lab in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with a specific goal: to develop new products as quickly as possible.
After starting his career as an entrepreneur in Brazil, SVP of Innovation, Robert Masiero first came to ADP 20 years ago through an acquisition—and he’s been building new technologies here ever since. Below, he reflects on what led to the founding of the ADP Innovation incubators in Brazil and the U.S., explains the beliefs that shape his leadership style, and shares the cutting-edge challenges the team is taking on next.
First, tell us about your background and what brought you to ADP.
I started working in technology while I was in college as a mainframe operator on the overnight shift. I didn’t get much sleep! After that, I learned to code and became a developer, then did mainframe support. I had this urge to start my own business—and I did a few times. The first two failed, but the third one, a consulting company that transitioned applications from mainframes to open systems like Linux and Unix, did well. Eventually, we decided to create our own software for things our clients needed, things like HR, payroll, and accounts receivable.
That software went through several iterations, from character-based to client-server, Windows-based to the web. That was the mid-90s, and it was unusual to have software that could run in a browser, so large companies started showing interest. We added team members, but eventually, our product outgrew our business—we needed to expand our sales force, distribution support, and ability to do on-site implementations. At the time, there was no venture capital in Brazil; your only options were getting a bank loan or finding a partner. So we started going to trade shows. At one of them, we knew ADP would be two booths down from us, so we made sure to get their attention—we had this big TV screen showing all our client logos, many of which were also ADP clients. That started a conversation, and ADP ended up acquiring the business.
What was it like to integrate into such a large company?
I remember thinking we had a massive opportunity to succeed because, back in those days, ADP had mostly manual processes—people called or faxed in their payroll. So, in our first six months, we took the software we’d built for our clients to use and built a layer on top of it that allowed ADP to run things on a client’s behalf. We were just this tiny new acquisition, and ADP was very conservative at the time, so when we presented the updated software we’d created, I wanted to put on a big show. I rented a hotel ballroom, even though I didn’t have the budget for it, and I invited the entire leadership team.
They gave us a couple of large clients, and that turned out to be transformative. After a while, ADP shut down their mainframes in Brazil and moved those clients to our software—including GPA, which is like the Wal-Mart of Brazil, and the largest single payroll we ran globally. The complete transition took a few years. When we were done, ADP’s U.S. leadership team sent their CTO down to take a look; I think they weren’t quite sure it was real. But he liked what he saw—clients were happier, costs were down—so they invited me to move to the U.S. and adapt the software from a new tax credit services acquisition.
You started the first ADP Innovation Lab around that time. What led to that one—and the second lab?
We decided to open the first lab in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with a specific goal: to develop new products as quickly as possible. At the time, I was more familiar with the talent there than in the U.S. In Brazil, I could build a team of people I already knew, who were already familiar with the technology we wanted to use. So, ADP’s primary development team handled payroll, while we had a small team that focused on the tax credit work.
After the project was over, ADP invited me to run a Shared Services team of 700 people who handle identity management, the enterprise service business, and our internal associate portal. Then I moved over to Enterprise Architecture for a while. But I still had an entrepreneurial drive. About a decade ago, I went to ADP leadership and said I wanted to build an Innovation Lab here in the U.S. to focus on incubating completely new ideas. They said, “Okay, let’s do it,” and they gave me a team of four to get it started.
Tell us about some of the projects that the lab has developed.
We launched around the time the iPhone came out, so our first project was ADP Mobile. We put it together in about a year, and we used modern database tools like MongoDB rather than the Java- and Oracle-based ones that were typical at the time. We also built it for everyone; small businesses and multinational corporations could use it, and it worked in every country and supported 40 different languages. It grew very well—I think we reached a million users in less than a year. But I’d said from the start when we created that lab. I wanted to keep it small and flat, never more than 30 people, which meant when a project reached a certain level of maturity, it would “graduate” from the lab and get a dedicated R&D team. That’s what we did with mobile, which now has something like 25 million users.
After that, we worked on the tablet application and then built out semantic search, which we now use across ADP’s core products. The most recent project that graduated from the lab is ADP Marketplace, a collection of HR solutions that clients can customize and integrate with our software. The latest product we developed is called Roll™, which required an entirely different way of thinking about our services. Roll™ is a 100% mobile chatbot platform that simplifies payroll using state-of-the-art AI and natural language processing technologies. It can intelligently alert a client when something needs their attention—it’s an unprecedented level of automation.
What do you think makes a good leader?
In part, I think it’s about completely understanding the work your team is doing. When you’re running a large organization, of course, it’s also about who you put in charge—you have to trust your direct reports to make the right decisions. But even when I was leading hundreds of people in Shared Services, I still wanted to be familiar with the processes and skills they needed to do their jobs.
I never want to micromanage, but I do want to be hands-on and in the know. It’s leading by example—if there’s a production issue, for instance, I’ll be on a late call with the team. People appreciate it when you’re committed to their ideas, and they can trust you to have an educated conversation about the decisions that need to be made, whether that’s around technology or go-to-market strategy.
A good leader also ensures everyone on the team has a voice, whether they have ten days of tenure or ten years. In fact, the untrained eye of someone who’s starting their career can be a phenomenal asset to the rest of us. If you have an opinion or see something we could do differently, it’s so important that your input be heard and considered. Ultimately, we have to be pragmatic in our decision-making, but I love debate. I love being challenged and being proven wrong. The push and pull from many different perspectives makes this work fun.
What’s challenging about your work?
The toughest thing for any leader is making difficult decisions that affect other people. If you’re letting someone go, for example, even if it will be healthier for everyone involved, that’s very hard.
ADP’s size can also be a challenge because change is difficult for any big company. But I see that as an opportunity: If something has been done the same way for decades, let’s ask why. How could we change that process to make it more efficient? ADP is exceptionally open to challenging the status quo. Our people have the incentive to challenge existing ideas and revisit how things are done to find opportunities to improve or design for better outcomes. Just as I like my team members to challenge my assumptions, we get the same message from the very top of the company: If you see a better way, a chance to transform the way you work, you should be able to do that.
What’s exciting to you about ADP’s future?
I’m excited for us to continue investing in new ideas to make the lives of our clients and ADP associates better. We’re going through a period of significant change, and that’s never without challenges. But the level of commitment I’ve seen keeps me hopeful. We’re doing our small part in the lab with products like Roll™, and that’s just a portion of a company-wide effort to deliver on new technologies and innovations. All of us are committed to success and meeting our clients’ and associates’ expectations with innovative products and technologies that will have a phenomenal payoff and carry us through many years to come.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Future of UX Design at ADP: Making Life Simpler for Everyone.
Senior Leaders, UX Design, Career Journey
“In my interview with our Chief Product Officer…it was clear that I would be part of a leadership team that truly supports one another and that the support extends across ADP.”
From engineering to design, Kevin Mackie has had an extensive career in leadership. Our new VP of UX Design System started programming at 12 years old, working his way up the ladder to engineering management. There, he discovered his love of User Experience (UX) and how it helped him “probe into the problem space” before looking for solutions. Now he’s combining everything he’s learned for a new challenge: building a design system at scale. Below, he shares what attracted him to ADP, his plan to align his multidisciplinary team, and how he’s moving UX design forward for large enterprises.
Tell us about the highlights of your career so far. What brought you to UX design?
Each weekend when I was 12 years old, my neighbor, a programmer for the U.S. Navy, would bring home a 27-pound portable for me to play games on. He began teaching me to program, and I got addicted, later completing a degree in computer science. About 20 years ago, I started working my way up the leadership ladder, and by 2011, I was running a global engineering team at Taleo.
One day, the VP of product management brought in a UX expert to talk to the design team, and walking past their conference room, I saw an explosion of Post-it notes. I was so intrigued that I asked if I could crash their party, and that’s how I learned how to do user research in the field and turn it into insights. While engineers and software developers love to jump into the solution space—which often leaves us solving the wrong problem—this introduction to UX showed me the possibilities for probing into the problem space instead.
I started leading UX teams in 2014 when my former general manager unexpectedly asked me to join CA Technologies as the VP of Design, and that’s when I really fell in love with UX. Recently, though, I began feeling the need for a change. “I’ve led engineering teams globally at scale; I’ve led design teams globally at scale,” I said to myself. “How can I leverage the experiences of doing both?” Clearly, the universe listened because ADP called shortly after Thanksgiving to ask if I’d be interested in leading their design system.
What made you want to join ADP?
Usually, I’m the one trying to convince leadership about the value of a design system. But in my interview with our Chief Product Officer, he was the one who articulated its importance to me. That showed me I’d be joining a team committed to improving the experiences we deliver to our employees, our customers, and particularly their employees—our end users. It was also clear that I would be part of a leadership team that truly supports one another and that the support extends across ADP.
My intuition paid off on day one. I joined as we’re building a small coalition to focus on UX. After the announcement introducing me went out, people flooded my inbox with welcome messages and offers of help. I’ve never experienced that reaction at a new company before. There’s also an entire ethos around playing to each employee’s strengths to build a great overall team. No one hired me to fix anything; I’m here to complement the leadership team. ADP is a great place if you want to be part of an organization invested in helping you grow.
What’s your approach to building ADP’s design system?
What I love about UX as a discipline is how diverse we are—most of us did not go to school for graphic design. So, I know this sounds right out of a management book, but I’m starting with the “people” part of “people, processes, and products.” I’m about halfway through the one-on-ones I set up with each of my team members to understand their products and their specific journeys. I’ve talked to people who started off in music, building architecture, or went from chemical engineering to design. Tapping into these individual perspectives can help us better understand our problems and develop some really creative solutions.
We’re approaching the design system as a separate product. Developing a shared language about what makes a great experience is part of the transformation. Instead of building something we think our designers and developers need, we’re partnering with them, so when we deliver the design system, the teams will already be on board.
When it comes to philosophical alignment, the best approach is empathy. Not only empathy for the product managers and developers but empathy for our own work. The more we appreciate and understand the motivations and challenges of others, the better we can work together as a high-performing, cross-functional team. I encourage people to have healthy disagreements and act as influencers who can go back to their teams and bring everyone along on the journey.
What is most challenging about your work?
It’s challenging to build a design system at scale in a company of more than 58,000 people. Thankfully, with the large number of UX professionals throughout ADP, we’re not starting from scratch. My team’s job is to take already great work to the next level—it’s like we’re a group of conductors from different orchestras, asking how we make the whole thing come together.
A lot of it comes down to transparency and alignment on what’s working and what’s not. To do that, we need to measure the usability of our apps and define whether someone has a good or bad experience. For example, our ADP Mobile app has a 4.7 rating with more than 1.5 million reviews in the App store. Even so, usability studies show us people sometimes hover over the submit button for minutes, likely out of uncertainty about their selections. So, how do we give them the type of “confidence experience” so that they can review their choice and say, “Yes, that’s what I want,” and click without hesitation?
We’re also figuring out the right things to measure. Successful consumer-grade applications always measure how long it takes someone to do something and prompts them for feedback. So how do we incorporate more feedback into our products? Since I recently got my ADP account, it thinks I’m a new user. Thirty seconds after searching for the first time, I got a nice pop-up asking, “How did you like the search experience?” Then after I answered, I got a second prompt asking, “Would you like to tell us why?” I thought that was a great way to get feedback in the moment.
What does the future hold for you and ADP?
First, we’ve got a pretty clear vision of the future that we’ll continue to refine. Whether it’s a frontend developer, a designer, or the product team with limited UX resources, our goal is to get our teams on board. We want to make it easier for them to deliver better experiences faster to make life easier for our users. After all, business owners don’t wake up in the morning because they want to run payroll software. They started a company because they have a dream. And we’re here to help them realize that dream by making payroll, benefits, and compensation easier for them.
We have the unique ability to learn from what’s working at small, medium, and large businesses. There’s no reason why we can’t deliver consumer-grade experiences at an enterprise level. Whether you’re an employee of a five-person organization or a 1-million-person organization, you still want to understand your compensation. You still want to grow professionally. I joined ADP specifically because we’re committed to putting in the work to help simplify life for everyone. When our clients come back to us and say, “Oh yeah, this product is great. It enables our business,” I’ll know things are humming.
Curious about a career in UX? Check tech.adp.com for our current openings.
Kevin Mackie is a Vice President, UX Design Systems at ADP based in California.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Three tips for successfully managing a global virtual team
Leadership Tips, Virtual Teams
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to manage a global virtual team?
Well, even if you didn’t imagine it three months ago, thanks to Pandemic 2020, even onsite teams are now led remotely. Your team members might as well be in another country because the tech and techniques are the same. Welcome to virtual team leadership. I’ll share a few things that have worked for me.
I’m a Director of Product Development for ADP’s GlobalView solution, a Global Payroll Engine that supports 42 countries in a single environment. In this role, I lead a team of Country Solution Managers for the Americas region with team members located in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and the U.S., so lots of time zones and cultural richness.
Today, the world is getting smaller as companies are getting more global. ADP isn’t an exception, but rather a pioneer in global business. Matrix organizations like ADP are considerably more advanced and efficient. They have structures for core functions like finance, technology, sales, etc., concentrated in places where they can provide efficiency and allow resources to scale down for global optimization. ADP actively recruits in over 26 countries, with the largest concentrations in maybe 10 of them.
So, how best to approach managing in a global virtual environment?
Be sensitive and fair. Managing a multicultural team can be challenging and require you to adapt your managerial style in a way to create an engaged and productive team. Some unexpected challenges you may not realize is that as a multi-country manager, you may need to navigate between multiple HRIS and time management systems, compensation policies, and sometimes various languages and cultural understanding. It’s important to be sensitive and fair when dealing with time zones. Finding the right time for a global team meeting is critical. When it’s 8:00 AM in New Jersey, it’s already 6:00 PM in Hyderabad, India, and 10:00 PM in Sydney, Australia. As a manager, I find pursuing balance essential so that no associates feel unfairly treated, and they stay incented to participate actively and contribute in meetings.
Make time and keep a pulse on the action. Our StandOut product is the best tool I’ve found to manage remote teams. I’m not a sales guy, and I’m not pitching anything, but I truly believe it. It helps me keep track of engagements and progress on projects while encouraging my direct reports to tell me what they “loved” this week versus what they “loathed.” The weekly frequency keeps the dialogue open so that I’m having 52 conversations a year with my people. It provides me as a leader with an easy-to-use platform and personalized tips and concepts for me to leverage with each associate based on their strengths. But, in my opinion, one of the most important tools I use when managing a remote team is the “One on One” session. Every week I make sure that I have at least one meeting with each of my team members. These sessions supplement what I see in StandOut. They’re not just to check on each individual’s progress but to have candid conversations to build trust and personal connection.
Be empathetic. Empathy and trying to understand what an associate is going through, especially when they have difficult moments, are key to a successful team. After all, engaged employees are essential to having happy clients.
Chris Acostendai is a Vice President of Product Development at ADP.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Why Working Here is Exciting
Leadership, Voice of Our People
ADP has been investing heavily in technology for the last five years.
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Hear from one of our leaders why this is an exciting time to work for ADP.
Being a first-time Engineering Leader
“You did a great job as a senior engineer. You are now promoted to a manager to lead the new team that we just formed. Congratulations on your new role!”
It is something on these lines that most people get promoted or at least that is how I remember when I was promoted to a manager. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with promotions such as this. The key though is in recognising that the expectations change when this happens. As we moved up the individual contributor (IC) ladder we learnt to solve harder technical problems. This change in role, though changes the operating field a little. It is in this context that I am listing out a few things that would have helped me transition into my role as a manager better, when I started out.
Transition from a maker to manager schedule
Staying hands on — in other words writing production quality code is a reality for most first time managers making this transition. It is also likely the first time where you end up navigating both kinds of schedules on a daily basis and it is a hard thing to do. Learn to be protective of your calendar. You could do this by:
Blocking your time in the calendar where you need to stay heads down. I’d suggest at least 3 hours at a time and then adjust up or down depending on what is an ideal chunk of uninterrupted time for you to get something meaningful done
Being ever more mindful of how you now schedule time with your direct reports. Just because you have moved onto a different schedule does not mean they should have to. If you are conscious of how you set up these meetings, that is one more thing you are doing for your team
Doing what you can to string your meetings into one contiguous block. Better yet, define your meeting times and agree with your peers. With a little back and forth, this usually works well for everyone and is another barrier for folks who gatecrash into your time with unplanned meetings
If you want to know more about different types of schedules, Paul Graham’s article explains it quite well.
Stay hands on
You are most likely a manager of a team with highly opinionated ICs. You need to be able to have a conversation with them, ask the right questions, pressure test their approach.
Pressure on your time as an IC will only increase as you grow and if you don’t strive to stay hands on, very soon you will find yourself too far from where the action is. You don’t necessarily have to pick up the most critical problem to solve but do what you must to stay relevant and make a meaningful contribution.
Impediment remover, not always a problem solver
After years of being an IC where you are used to solving problems yourself, it can be hard to take a step back.
Be the person who helps your teams get over the hump even if you are not the one who identified the problem or fixed it. Serve the team in the capacity that is best needed at the time and avoid being a seagull manager. With a young team, it could mean leading with a solution while with more mature teams, it could just be about asking the right questions. And in some other cases, maybe it is just carrying pizza!!
Carve out time for career development
A key reason you choose to be a manager is that you genuinely believe that you can have a greater impact on your purpose by developing a strong team. Be interested in each member’s aspirations, be on the lookout for their strengths and biases. Provide timely feedback. Help identify opportunities that will help them hone their newly acquired skills. These are all things perhaps any standard course on “New Managers” will refer to. There are many talks and articles out there to drive home the point that when you can align aspirations with the organisational goals that is when you are likely to have the most impact, but also derive personal satisfaction. Do the most you can to make this a practice.
Bar raiser
You have to do this at every opportunity you get, not just when hiring someone into the team. You have to be the cheerleader during your team’s journey towards excellence. Raise the bar when it comes to technical excellence; be the torchbearer when it comes to upholding your organisations credos and values. Often in the quest for an organisation’s immediate imperatives culture takes a back seat. Protect, sustain and improve your organisation’s culture like your organisation’s life depends on it; because it actually does.
Manage upwards and sideways
Managing upwards or to the side is typically seen by engineers as an ugly part of organizational politics. Other than the typical activities that are required to manage information, the biggest reason to do this is because software development is a collaborative activity. Managing in its purest sense is about aligning priorities across teams. You will be able to achieve your goals better if you can influence your peers to row in the same direction and are aligned with the direction your manager has in mind. At the same time, this is also about course correcting if need be and ensuring people on the impacted teams understand why a correction is better for everyone.
Conclusion
Doing some or all of these things will not turn you into a super manager overnight. I like to compare this to going to the gym. You will not notice any change after your first day at the gym, but keep at it long enough and the results will be clear for all to see.
The Technology Helping Companies Embrace The Future of Work
To embrace the future of work, companies need technology that mimics how their organizations are structured and how their workers relate to one another.
Today’s work relationships, for example, are complex and fluid. Using highly structured relational databases, which organize data hierarchically in rows and columns to represent these relationships, no longer makes sense.
Instead, we need adaptable technology that models data based on contextual relationships. Enter graph databases, a revolutionary technology that Gartner predicts will grow 100% per year over the next couple of years.
Early Applications Of Graph Databases
Graph databases may now be leveraged by giants like Google and Amazon, but they weren’t always popular. In fact, their popularity grew with the rise of social media.
Consider the complex relationships between people, places and things stored in social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn. Organizing these relationships based on hierarchies is problematic, as it doesn’t align with the world’s natural order. That not only leads to inaccurate data models, but also dramatically increases the amount of effort it takes for a program to locate any given object.
Let me explain: Say you’re searching a social network for the CEO of Company X. When a software program searching a graph database reaches Company X, it finds the CEO right away. After all, the CEO works at Company X — they are directly related.
Putting People First To Rebuild A Stronger Economy: A Conversation With Ochsner Health
When a software program searching a relational database reaches Company X, on the other hand, it finds a hierarchy of people, divided into teams, which it must scan to locate the CEO. Teams are further divided into types of teams. The CEO is located on the executive leadership team, which sits within the broader leadership team. It’s not until the program finally reaches Company X’s team of executives that it locates the CEO.
This complicated structure — an information architecture with at least four levels (just within Company X) — slows a social network’s data retrieval, resulting in a less-than-effective user experience.
In response to this challenge, Facebook’s engineering team developed a proprietary database that they called The Associations and Objects (TAO). This innovative technology allowed them to model the multifaceted relationships between people, places and things based on context instead of hierarchies. In other words, they no longer had to follow long data chains to retrieve specific information, which significantly increased the speed at which content was presented to users.
Modeling Work Relationships: Challenge And Solution
Given the complexity of human relationships, graph databases are much better suited to modeling the way companies operate than their predecessors were. The thing is, work is now done in teams, not hierarchies. In fact, 64% of workers now belong to more than one team, according to our company’s 2019 Global Study of Engagement report. And while hierarchical teams continue to exist, cross-functional, dynamic teams focused on achieving specific goals are more prevalent than ever.
In addition, today’s workers often have multiple roles within an organization, and their relationships aren’t limited to those they have with their supervisor and/or direct reports. Companies thus need technology that models these structures and relationships, empowering them to embrace cutting-edge business models built for the future of work.
A graph database can help empower companies to leverage both traditional and alternative workers (i.e., full- and part-time employees, temporary contractors, gig workers, and freelancers) across multiple teams (both functional and cross-functional) within the organizational model that best suits them, including one based on hierarchies, teams or projects.
So when should organizations consider a graph database? In our experience, we have found graph databases to be very useful when the datasets are associative in nature, as they avoid the often-expensive join operations that a traditional relational database will have to undergo. This nondependency on join operations helps them scale better, especially when dealing with growing datasets with an evolving data schema. While there are multiple vendors out there in the market, our company uses AWS Neptune for our managed graph database needs to conform to our overarching approach of going cloud-native.
Embracing The Future of Work
Innovative leaders at companies across the globe are already reimagining work with an eye to the future. HR technology powered by graph databases can empower these organizations to achieve their visions, enhancing performance and productivity along the way.
Based on what we’ve seen so far, it pays off: Deloitte’s 2019 Human Capital Trends (page 54) report found that over half of surveyed companies that make the shift to a team-based organizational model see significant improvements in performance. Moreover, because technology that leverages graph databases to represent a company’s workforce is more aligned with reality, the insights derived provide more accurate and actionable learnings, which is equally important to succeeding in the future of work.
Tech & Innovation Blog
ADP Talks Trends at Fast Company Innovation Day
Innovation, Tech News, Trends
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Video: Trends Influencing the Future of Work
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[TEXT: Trends Influencing the Future of Work]
[LOGO: ADP, Always Designing for People]
[TEXT: Don Weinstein, Corporate Vice President, Global Product and Technology] Thank you, everybody, for coming out in here. It’s our Fast Company Innovation Festival. Going to be talking about innovation in the world of work.
[TEXT: Roberto Masiero, SVP of ADP Innovation Labs] Innovation, to me, is just thinking different. It’s just trying to find better outcomes.
[TEXT: Doug Politi, President, Compliance Solutions] My view is everything has to serve a business function and ultimately for us to drive growth.
[TEXT: Martha Bird, ADP Business Anthropologist] For me, it’s about asking questions differently, and it’s not so much forward facing, but it’s actually looking back. And so what are the difficult and messy challenges that we’re trying to solve for? The problem may not change, but the technology changes to address it.
[DON WEINSTEIN] You really have to think about, you know, who are the people that you’re putting into that process?[MARTHA BIRD] It’s really about putting together people who are really different. When I’ve come up with a change or done something different, I’ve had friction.
[ROBERTO MASIERO] It’s just really like putting the right team together with a good vision in front of it.
[DOUG POLITI] But it can’t stay in the lab. So it’s got to be–
[ROBERTO MASIERO] It can’t stay in the lab, no.
[DOUG POLITI] It’s got to– it’s got to ripple its way through the organization as a whole.
[DON WEINSTEIN] Space and time are the oxygen that innovation needs to breathe to fuel the fire.
[LOGO: ADP, Always Designing for People]
ADP understands the trends driving the evolving workplace, allowing us to build adaptive tools that help our clients work better. Hear from our panel of ADP Technology Leaders about what innovation means to them, how they look at key trends and how, as a collective whole, they are pushing the evolution of work.
