Product + Engineering
Slack-Integrated HRMS
A full-stack HRMS built around Slack — and the primary case study for the NextLeap PM Fellowship.
The problem
Employees already lived in Slack all day, but HR workflows — leave requests, approvals, attendance — lived in a separate portal nobody opened until they needed it, which made even simple requests slower than they should have been. The gap wasn't a missing feature, it was a mismatch between where the work happened and where the tool lived.
How it works
Architecture and flow, step by step.
- 1
User research & scoping
User research & scoping
Talked to employees and managers about where the existing process actually broke down before writing a line of code — narrowed the fellowship scope to leave management and approvals rather than the full HR surface.
- 2
Slack-native interactions
Slack-native interactions
Leave requests, approvals, and status checks happen as Slack slash commands and interactive messages — no context switch to a separate portal for the common path.
- 3
Full-stack backend
Full-stack backend
A backend service owns the source of truth for leave balances and approval state, exposing it to Slack via webhooks/interactions and to a lightweight web view for HR admins.
- 4
Ship, cut, and prioritize
Ship, cut, and prioritize
Scoped ruthlessly against the fellowship timeline — shipped the core request → approve → track loop, explicitly deferred payroll and org-chart features that didn't serve the primary workflow.
Tech stack
Impact
The numbers that came out of it.
Slack-native
Primary Surface
Request → Approve → Track
Core Loop Shipped
NextLeap PM Fellowship
Context
Cut to ship on time
Scope
Key challenges & decisions
The non-obvious tradeoffs, and why they were made.
Slack-first over a standalone web app
Met people where they already worked, but constrained the UI to what Slack's Block Kit could express — some HR admin views still needed a separate lightweight web panel.
Cut payroll and org-chart features from scope
Both were requested in user research, but neither served the leave-management workflow the case study was built to prove out — cut to protect the timeline, not because they didn't matter.
Optimized for manager approval speed over configurability
Leave policies are simpler than a fully configurable HR system would allow — a deliberate tradeoff to keep the primary workflow fast.
This project's code isn't public yet.