WorkMarket Platform Overview

I’m going to share a little bit about our platform architecture, at a high level how we are thinking about the HCM space, and specifically about how we envision the Enterprise using WorkMarket to manage all their 1099 workers.

We call our platform “WorkOS”, and we are designing for scale both in terms of traditional technology service level, but also to add new features and engineers to the system. To achieve our scalability goals, we need to build extensibility into the platform from the ground up.

The capabilities of WorkOS are provided by domain specific Modules. The core modules, work, pay, talent and team, are linked by a module we call “Engage”. Engage is where we believe the true value of WorkMarket exists — the ability to have multiple independent engagements under one or more contracts that result in zero or more payable events is unique to the 1099 domain. This high cardinality model allows WorkMarket to capture the nuanced relationships that exist between workers and employers in a way that reduces the friction and risk associated with contract work.

As a developer of the WorkOS, the core services provide the platform to build new modules and integrate seamlessly into the workflow and experience. We wanted to extend that seamless integration to our solutions engineering and partner developers because we know that each customer will have unique needs, requiring WorkMarket to be flexible to bend and extend via configuration and customization at all levels. We’ve designed the development experience to allow engineers and integrators and even savvy system administrators to configure and customize their instance. Customizations can be built and installed on a need basis, and can be embedded directly into the WorkMarket experience.

We studied our customers and other SaaS providers like NetSuite, SalesForce, Jira, Workday, and Service Now to validate the use cases that would best enable WorkOS to integrate and extend a customers existing business practice. The research led us to three critical points of extension:

• schema extension / custom fields
• process and status / workflow
• Custom UI

These three points of extension are baked in to our API and core entities, making Agile Apps extremely powerful bridge between our off the shelf product and our customers’ needs.

With this platform, we can sell off-the-shelf solutions, extend them by creating apps using our front end SDK, as well as allowing partners and integrators to extend the core capabilities of the platform with schema extension, workflow and process modeling, as well as embedding custom UI into the experience.

I hope this overview gives you an idea of our perspective on platform extensibility, enterprise “land and expand” sales strategy, as well as the unique shape of the 1099 domain model.