How systems design powered a strategic partnership for Remote
How a focus on service architecture, not screens, powered a seamless white-label integration between Gusto and Remote.
Product
Gusto + Remote White-Label Integration Partnership
Role
Lead Product Designer
Challenge
Design a product with almost no interface, allowing Gusto's customers to hire internationally through Remote without ever feeling like they left the Gusto platform.
Outcome
The complete service blueprint for a strategic partnership that became a significant revenue channel. The project was a masterclass in systems thinking, proving that the best UX is sometimes the one you never see.
Case: Remote Workflows
The problem wasn't just connecting two apps; it was about hiding our complexity
At Remote, our core strength was handling the immense legal and logistical complexity of international employment. A major strategic goal was to offer this capability as an embedded, "white-label" service to other HR platforms.
This created a unique design challenge. For a partner's customer, the experience had to be invisible. They click a button on a platform they already trust, and the "magic" of global compliance just happens in the background, powered by Remote. There could be no feeling of being handed off to a third-party service.
My job wasn't to design screens. It was to design the absence of friction. The user experience would be defined not by pixels, but by the silent, reliable conversation between two complex systems.
Case: Remote Workflows
The strategy was to design the system as the product itself
When the product is a system, the primary design tool isn't Figma—it's the service blueprint. My approach was to map every single interaction, data transfer, and potential failure point as if it were a user flow.
I treated the APIs and webhooks as our main "user interface." The goal was to make the conversation between Remote's and our partner's systems so well-designed that it would be completely transparent to the end-user. My role was to act as the translator between the product and engineering teams of both companies, ensuring this "conversation" was clear, efficient, and error-proof.
This meant my design artifacts weren't wireframes, but detailed process maps that defined the entire service.
Case: Remote Workflows
The process was about mapping every detail of an invisible experience
My core deliverable was a series of Service Blueprints that became the single source of truth for the project. I mapped critical journeys like "Employee Onboarding" and "Time and Attendance Processing," showing who did what, which system was responsible, and how data flowed between them.
This required deep technical collaboration. My role was to constantly ask, "What does this mean for the user?" even when the "user" was another company's system. I focused on the few visible touchpoints, like designing the logic for the co-branded email an employee would receive. This single email had to perfectly establish trust and clarity, introducing Remote as a seamless partner.
By mapping the entire system, we could anticipate edge cases and design for them, ensuring the integration was not just functional, but resilient.
Remote | Workflows
The final result was a blueprint for future strategic partnerships
The integration launched successfully, becoming a major strategic win for Remote. It created a powerful new go-to-market channel and proved the scalability of our platform for these types of embedded experiences.
The success was defined by what users didn't experience: no friction, no confusion, no feeling of being passed between different companies. My biggest takeaway was a lesson in systems design: sometimes the most impactful design work has nothing to do with pixels. It's about architecting the underlying logic that makes