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Fischbach Gruppe

About the project

Onboarding Tool — turning chaos into one connected system.

An onboarding and offboarding webapp for Fischbach's 1,000+ workforce — coordinating hardware, software licenses, vehicles, access, furniture, insurance, and other resources in one system.

At that scale, managing resource handoff and return across departments becomes chaotic — no one has real-time visibility into what's missing for whom, delaying both a worker's start and their exit.

Role
Product Designer
Team
Fischbach
Timeline
2024 – 2025

Behind the scenes

Before the pixels: what the mockups don't show.

Every screen came from somewhere — a conversation, a sketch, a flow that didn't work the first time. Here's the part before it looked finished.

Flowchart mapping the onboarding request process across HR, the Key User, and IT approvals for hardware, transport, and uniforms.
Not just steps — the moments where someone could feel lost, and how the flow catches them.
FigJam board listing which dashboard access each role needs: Geschäftsführer, Key User, Hardware and workspace, Clothing and company car, and Insurance.
The things I didn't want to forget between one call and the next.
Meeting notes board tracking open questions and decisions with stakeholders across weekly syncs.
Meeting notes from users, teams, and everyone involved — no polish here, just what people actually said before I shaped it into something else.
Overview of the Figma file with the different onboarding flow screens and wireframes laid out side by side.
Every frame here traces back to something someone said.

Let's roll up our sleeves

This didn't come from a prompt, it came from listening to someone.

Before anything looked finished, wireframes let us test what actually worked — with the people who'd use it.

Hand-drawn wireframe sketches of two dashboard screens for a team member, showing tasks and an active checklist.
Hand-drawn wireframe sketch of a workspace (Arbeitsplatz) screen, with hardware icons and a table/chair layout annotated in red.
Hand-drawn wireframe sketch of a phone number input field, annotated in red with a note about a required input field.

And yeap, I also use AI in my workflows.

We went from spreadsheets and back-and-forth emails to a system where everyone can see the status at a glance. It gave us hours back every week.

Alex Bauer Operations Coordinator, Fischbach

Ordering a laptop or a smartphone used to take a week of back-and-forth. Now it takes two minutes.

Julia Hoffmann IT Support, Fischbach

The process

Four stages, one problem worth solving

Not a straight line — each stage fed the next, and a few looped back more than once.

  1. Research

    Talking to 15 people across 8 departments to map their role in onboarding and where it breaks down for them — before sketching anything.

    3 months

  2. Define

    Fifteen different problems, one root cause: no one could see what was happening in real time.

    2 months

  3. Design

    Turning the flow into screens — categories over forms, visibility over guessing.

    5 months

  4. Validate

    Testing the first version with the same people who described the problem.

    3 months
David and Vanessa Trinks testing the software modules together on their laptops.
Not a screenshot — an actual afternoon testing this with Vanessa from Digitalisierung.

Limitations

  • — Third-party API access took 6 months — the entire trigger system depended on it.
  • — Not everyone could be interviewed. Time constraints meant some perspectives came secondhand.
  • — Data quality varied — some databases weren't clean enough to build on directly.
  • — Explaining long, multi-step flows to developers is still a work in progress — videos, tickets, docs, whatever keeps nothing lost in translation.

Learnings

  • — Interviews rarely give you the full truth. Asking the same thing a different way often revealed what the first answer left out.
  • — German is my third language — a limitation some days, and the steepest professional growth curve I've chosen to keep climbing.