Workday Integration
Designing third-party integration to unify cross-system workflows and preserve enterprise data integrity.
Role
Product Designer
Company
Zendesk
Timeline
12 weeks
Starting point
Zendesk Workforce Management users had no way to connect their time-off data with third-party HRIS platforms like Workday. That meant entering the same time-off request twice, once in the HRIS and once in Zendesk, with no guarantee the two stayed in sync. It was slow, it was error-prone, and it put Zendesk at a real disadvantage against competitors who already offered this kind of integration.
The need was clear: connect the two systems so time-off and scheduling data didn't have to be maintained by hand in two places, and so payroll and reporting could be trusted to be accurate.
Journey
This was WFM's first third-party integration, so the work split across two layers with different stakes: integration setup and management, built for the System Admin persona, and day-to-day scheduling, built for the CS Manager or Team Lead persona who would actually see the synced data daily. Getting either layer wrong risked breaking trust in the other.
For the setup experience, I placed integration configuration inside Zendesk's Admin Center rather than inside WFM itself. That decoupled the admin management flow from WFM, removed context switching for admins, and kept setup consistent with how Zendesk Support's existing Workday integration already worked.
The central design constraint was that data only ever flowed in one direction per data type. Time off data flowed from Workday into Zendesk, and Workday stayed the source of truth: agents could see their approved time off in WFM, but couldn't edit it there. Attendance data flowed the other way, from Zendesk into Workday, so start and end times captured in WFM could feed payroll. Neither system tried to reconcile changes made in both places, which meant the interface had to prevent conflicting entries by design, not by asking users to remember which system owned which piece of data.
The mechanism I designed gave admins two explicit controls during setup: one to automatically delete duplicate time off entries by prioritizing whatever came from Workday over anything already in WFM, and one to turn off native time off requests inside WFM entirely, so agents could only request time off through Workday in the first place. Instead of trying to reconcile two competing entry points after the fact, the design removed the second entry point when an admin chose to. This design decision prevented duplicate time-off tracking in WFM reporting and analytics.
Outcome
The integration eliminated manual double entry for time off and scheduling data, and reporting and payroll became reliable in a way they hadn't been when two systems could silently drift apart. By designing around one-way data flow per type, WFM reached competitive parity with other workforce management tools already offering this kind of integration.
This project became the reference point for the integrations that followed, giving the team a reusable blueprint for connecting other HRIS platforms and a head start on the connection setup pattern itself. It also shaped how I operate on first-of-its-kind work with little internal precedent: pulling in designers from teams that had already shipped integrations, and mapping the data model closely enough with PMs across teams to catch edge cases before they became engineering problems.
