Design at Justworks: Showcasing our Values in our Product

At Justworks, we live by our core values, COGIS. COGIS stands for Compassion, Openness, Grit, Integrity, and Simplicity. These principles guide everything we do — every day, on every team, across the organization.

Arriving at COGIS wasn’t a short journey. It takes a while to figure out your culture and values. In the early days of Justworks, we tried to give some structure, but it didn't really stick. We had more than seven values, but it became clear that values don't matter as much if they include everything.

“With help from some outside experts, we distilled our values down to what made our team special, what made our product special, and what would define how we hire great people — and make great business decisions for years to come,” said Adam Meisel, Justworks’ Director of Design. COGIS was born.

Want to implement a strong culture based on core values at your organization? Download our free ebook on Hiring for Company Culture to get started.

Designing with Values in Mind

“We have this really awesome brand and voice externally, and I wanted to try to push for us to make that show through in our app as well.” - Olivia La Faire, Product Designer

“I interpret our brand as how we show our values to the world,” said Adam.

What does that means in practice? Some members of the product design team sat down for an interview to share how our values inform what they do, and how it appears in the Justworks platform. One standout example is the set of icons.

Developing icons to use throughout the Justworks app, website, and marketing materials was a fun and creative company branding project for the team. Of course, everyone has their favorites.

“I like the bird icons because they’re gender and race agnostic,” said Tom Takigayama, Senior Manager of Product Design.

"I interpret our brand as how we show our values to the world."

“It [the icon] does bring a little light and a little bit of joy to those stressful day-to-days or workflows, and hopefully tries to make that a more enjoyable experience,” said Product Designer Olivia La Faire.

Ensuring everything we do at Justworks is COGIS is important to us, because it means that we’re always working toward creating a great experience for our customers.

Following our values helps us to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes, and develop products and services that make their jobs easier. Part of this effort for our team is infusing our values into the company branding.