Discover how Rippling launched a new, collaborative product with Liveblocks, purpose-built to help teams prepare and meet together more effectively.
Join thousands of companies using Liveblocks to build multiplayer experiences for people and agents.
Rippling is a unified workforce platform that brings HR, IT, and finance into one system. Their mission is to provide companies with a single source of truth for their workforce, eliminating friction from people operations, automating administrative work, and connecting systems that rely on employee data.
Senior Engineering Manager, Jesse Ling, is in charge of building tools within Rippling’s performance management software, which helps managers develop and retain talent. Jesse’s team was tasked with developing a 1:1s tool that was as user friendly as Google Docs, but purpose-built to support efficient and structured 1:1s.
Google Docs provides a polished collaborative editing experience, but it lacks the structure and metrics teams need—such as visibility into whether managers are consistently holding weekly 1:1s. It also fails to preserve durable historical context, so that when managers change or leave, valuable notes are often lost, depriving new managers of critical insight.
The goal was to build a product that rivaled Google Docs’ ease-of-use, fit naturally into Rippling’s workflows, and deliver it quickly with a small team. The team’s focus needed to stay on the 1:1s product experience itself, rather than on rebuilding the complex realtime collaboration engine behind Google Docs.
The 1:1s tool in Rippling.
To deliver a polished and intuitive collaborative experience, Rippling needed features such as shared editing, presence, and reliable conflict resolution. Building this requires:
This infrastructure work would have added 1-2 months before they could even begin validating product-market fit. After launch, it would have required engineers with expertise with a fundamentally different background, and ongoing operational overhead that would pull time away from product development.
The robust state machine inside Liveblocks WebSocket infrastructure.
The Liveblocks team brought so much expertise to the table around how to build a truly seamless 1:1 experience for employees.Jesse LingSenior Engineering Manager at Rippling
Rippling chose Liveblocks for several reasons.
I highly recommend Liveblocks as partners if you’re looking for bringing in additional engineering expertise around Yjs.Jesse LingSenior Engineering Manager at Rippling
With Liveblocks, Rippling built a purpose-built 1:1s experience that rivals the ease and polish of Google Docs. The team shipped faster, avoided hiring for specialized infrastructure and websocket skills, and stayed focused on delivering a great product for managers and employees.
