How 58.com Built a Homegrown HR System to Replace Workday: A B2B Design Journey

Preface

After the pandemic, collaborative office tools surged and large internet companies' smart‑office solutions gained attention. Enterprises began focusing on internal service design to improve efficiency and employee happiness, leading to B‑to‑C style B‑end products. 58.com decided to develop its own HR system.

Background

Large enterprises with tens of thousands of employees typically purchase top foreign vertical HR systems such as Workday. 58.com uses Workday, but its overseas servers cause latency and raise data‑sovereignty concerns. To keep core talent data under its control, 58 aims to build an in‑house solution.

Exploration Phase

Understanding the business model is essential for B‑end products because customers have multiple roles and complex workflows. The goal was to address 58’s personalized HR management.

Deep Business Research : Conducted expert interviews, desktop research, and focus‑group sessions to map HR business forms and role divisions.

Competitive Analysis : Collected three foreign and two domestic HR systems, examined their interfaces, and explored suitable models for 58.

Definition Phase

Field visits to the Beijing branch revealed that sales onboarding was the most frequent and painful process. Interviews helped define design goals: digitization & automation, and localization of operation modes. A full‑life‑cycle employee journey map was created to identify pain points and optimization opportunities.

Design Phase

With an estimated 400+ pages and an eight‑month timeline, a traditional design process would be infeasible. The team adopted MVP thinking, breaking the system into minimal business units for rapid validation, and abstracted three core page skeletons, achieving a 27‑fold productivity boost.

Emotional design was also explored: adding subtle illustrations and a persona‑based virtual assistant to enhance employee experience without compromising functionality.

Implementation & Review Phase

Business stakeholders were embedded in the project team, running parallel data entry in the old and new systems to validate stability. Designers submitted iterative review reports, leading to a successful launch of the new HR system.

Conclusion

B‑end designers now have the opportunity to create their own products when existing solutions fall short. This case demonstrates how thorough research, MVP methodology, and emotional design can deliver a robust enterprise HR platform.