[Rippling](https://www.rippling.com) 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](https://www.rippling.com/en-GB/performance-management), 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. ## Why not use Google Docs? 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.

## Challenges involved To deliver a polished and intuitive collaborative experience, Rippling needed features such as shared editing, presence, and reliable conflict resolution. Building this requires: 1. Understanding and productionizing Yjs. 2. Creating WebSocket infrastructure. 3. Implementing observability and logging. 4. Designing failure recovery systems. 5. Maintaining on-call coverage for realtime collaboration failures. 6. Hiring infrastructure-specific engineers to the team. 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.

## Why Liveblocks? Rippling chose Liveblocks for several reasons. - **First party Lexical support**: Liveblocks offered the most powerful [Lexical integration](/docs/ready-made-features/multiplayer-editing/text-editor/lexical), which allowed Rippling to combine their existing editor with multiplayer collaboration without rewriting large parts of their system. - **Speed to market**: Liveblocks saved the team at least 1-2 months of work up front and allowed them to focus entirely on building a great 1:1s experience. - **Close alignment with the Yjs ecosystem**: Liveblocks sponsors the Yjs project and works closely with its founder, which gave Rippling further confidence in long term support and evolution of the underlying technology. - **High confidence in a working solution**: Liveblocks provided reliable syncing, presence, and shared state backed by Yjs. The team felt confident they could deliver the Google Docs level UX they were aiming for without unexpected complexity. ## Results 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.