Forma Manager Approval
This enterprise-grade feature offers global organizations like Salesforce a customizable workflow that includes policy validation and budget approval processes for funding and reimbursing career development expenses.
Overview
Benefits teams in large organizations struggle to ensure Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) are fully utilized for their intended purpose—supporting wellbeing, education, and caregiving. In enterprise settings, education benefits range from $80 to $8,000 per employee annually, creating a significant financial investment at risk of misuse (e.g., paying phone bills instead of earning a certification). For a company with 50,000 employees and a $5,000 allocation per person per year, that’s a $250 million budget at stake. I was brought in to design an experience that helps employees use education funds intentionally while enabling benefits teams to implement guardrails and evolve their policies.
Research
Observation: Quantitative research (account-level reports) shows that 60% of education claims are rejected each quarter due to non-compliance with program policies—far higher than other LSAs (e.g., wellbeing, work-from-home setup, caregiving).
Analysis: Other LSAs maintain compliance (<20% rejection rate), suggesting the issue isn’t just policy enforcement but a breakdown in how employees understand and navigate education benefits.
Insight: Employees may be unaware of or misinterpret eligibility requirements, leading to widespread misuse. The opportunity lies in redesigning the claims experience for education benefits—including workflow enhancements such as eligibility validation and manager budget approvals—to provide clearer guidance and prevent avoidable rejections.
Opportunity
Prioritize eligibility validation before manager and claim approvals
Analysis of reimbursement reports revealed that "ineligible" was the top rejection reason, with 80% of these claims already receiving manager budget approval. This highlights a gap in understanding what qualifies as an eligible expense. By introducing eligibility validation at the start of the approval process, employees can confirm eligibility before requesting funds and have more assurance when getting budget approvals, reducing overall claim rejections.
Clarify approval roles and success criteria
Support ticket analysis via Sentisum showed that employees and managers were unclear on their roles in the approval process, often assuming Forma would handle everything. This lack of clarity led to inefficiencies and frustration. The opportunity lies in elevating content clarity—providing clear guidance on who approves what, when approvals occur, and what defines a successful approval—ensuring all stakeholders play their part effectively.
Design solution
Feedback
Internal feedback:
Product partners sought quantifiable data to validate the need for workflow changes, as most LSAs follow a single-task flow rather than multiple approvals. Existing data lacked differentiation of relevant events, limiting insights. I collaborated with engineering leadership to create a new data table for targeted analysis and defined two success metrics: Engagement (education claims submitted / (fund requests submitted - canceled)) and Utilization (education claims reimbursed / education claims submitted). To support ongoing monitoring, I self-learned Metabase query builder, built a visualization dashboard, and facilitated discussions that uncovered engagement gaps, driving design improvements for fund requests and claim filing.
External feedback:
Salesforce’s benefits team requested displaying program policy articles at each step of the experience, as employees and managers approving budgets often skip reading terms. I advocated for reducing excessive content, instead introducing bite-sized guidance to aid decision-making and contextual components to visualize progress. During walkthroughs of before-and-after changes, the benefits team embraced the solution and provided valuable content feedback, informed by direct employee interactions.
Improvements
For customers
I collected documents from approved education claims by Salesforce employees and identified where current writing fell short in communicating success criteria clearly. After rewriting, the Salesforce team found the new guidance clearer and more digestible. We then brainstormed a potential next step: curating visual examples that could be linked in both product and policy documents.
For internal teams
Additionally, I invited the Ops team (who review employees’ fund requests and claims) to evaluate the reporting experience. I gathered their feedback and streamlined their workflow by creating an intuitive status overview for auditing and providing a single access point for requests and claims.
Testing
Phase 1: Gather first-hand customer feedback through regular syncs to refine design concepts, address custom needs, and explore how policy integration can enhance the experience.
Phase 2: Provide Salesforce's benefits teams with beta access to test the end-to-end employee experience, allowing for iteration before a broader release.
Phase 3: Expand access to other customers with dedicated education wallets (e.g., Yelp, UKG, LinkedIn), incorporating learnings from earlier phases to continuously improve the experience.
Outcome
The project isn't released yet, but it impacts a few key areas:
Roadmap & Leadership Buy-In: Collaborating with the Customer Success team through QBRs, I identified key gaps and use cases from Salesforce’s benefits team and highlighted broader demand from enterprise-tier customers. Using insights from sales conversations (Salesforce → Monterey AI → Slack → FigJam), I developed a design brief that framed the opportunity, leading to a strategic pivot and securing leadership buy-in to prioritize this feature in the 2025 roadmap.
Design & Research Contributions: I quantified customer pain points by analyzing claim reimbursement data across Salesforce’s three education accounts (US, Israel & Norway), revealing a month-over-month trend of negative continuation. I compared approval/rejection rates with other top LSAs and similar-tier accounts to contextualize the impact. Additionally, I conducted an experience audit, uncovering usability issues beyond reported concerns. Presenting these findings to Salesforce for validation sparked positive engagement and reinforced the need for design improvements.
Testimonials
"We’re thrilled to see this experience come to life! The workflow feels intuitive and aligns perfectly with what our team and employees need—it just makes sense." – Salesforce Benefits Team
Learnings
Post-Release Improvements: Replaced manual eligibility validation ($0.25 per review, costing $7,500 to process ~$30K in education claims for a single employer) with automated validation, cross-checking codified policy terms against user inputs to reduce operational costs and improve efficiency. Broader Product Strategy: Enhance employee awareness and discovery of education benefits by clarifying optimal use cases and reimbursement criteria (e.g., required proof materials, eligible timeframes, and amounts) to drive informed decision-making and successful benefits utilization.