Deel's Shield protects clients from misclassification risks when hiring contractors worldwide. While it had over 80% satisfaction among users, adoption was below 20% of eligible clients. My objective was to understand the reason behind this low adoption and build a solution to increase the numbers.

As a first step to find out what the issue was, I reached out to the Customer Success team to approach clients and schdule interviews with them. The selected group was a combination of Shield and non-Shield users, so I could ask active clients if there was a barrier when they joined and then confirm if those hypothesis were true after talking to the other users. Interviews revealed that:

• 70% of clients were unaware of the product.
• 60% didn't understand what misclassification was.
• Of the clients who did hear about Shield before, a lot felt they were just being pushed an insurance product.
• Many felt reactive when it came to compliance: "We were unaware that this as a potential risk." or even "I don't think this would happen in our company" - so the value was not clear.

With this, I noticed that one of the key things to improve our metrics was to surface the value of Shield more. We would stop being reactive and offering the product for potential clients after noticing risk and become a proactive partner in compliance.

1. A new home for Shield
Other than CS team reaching out, the only other way to know about Shield was during one of steps of the contract creation flow, where we asked if the client wants to add a layer of protection and briefly explained the product.

Clearly it wasn't being enough, so one of the first ideas was to make Shield a new hiring type. Clients would have employees, contractors and Shield as options. This would help with the visibility issue, because, as stated in the interviews, many just skipped that step for considering just a generic insurance, so the assumption was that putting it at the same level as contract types would change this.

Although the overall idea was in the right path, after early testing it was shown that moving the Shield option to early in the process didn't move the needle the way we thought it would. It generated a bit curiosity, but most users were used to select one of the other options and quickly finish it, so it was ignored once again. The new placement gave it more visibility but it wasn't contemplating the other half of the problem, which was showing value.


2. Designing for self-discovery
After some other failed tests in the contract creation space and then reviewing data from the interviews, the new idea hit. Our clients mentioned they don't like being pushed products, but those who were active saw why it was worth, so the new plan was to have people realize on their own that they need Shield.

The new service would be built to empower users to go throught the same process our team did to get results. This included entering basic information about the worker, like tax residence and job title, and details about the daily activities.


To stay away from the notion of offering product just for sales comissions, we got the suggestion from one of our directors to focus on the free aspect of it. This way, it would already pass one barrier and improve engagement numbers.

2. Actionable and recurring insights
The final touch was to build a home for this feature. The assessment itself was useful, however it's not needed very often. Once the first analysis of the workforce is done, the user just needs to go back when there's a new contractor and we wanted to drive more traffic to our new place in the Deel app.

To go along with the Worker Assesment Tool, we also added regulatory news and updates as a way to attract more views (which would mean more assessments and these would mean more Shield contracts). Deel already had a data base filled with this type of information and ready to be used, so we took advantage of this internal product for our new project.


3. Seamless delivery
Built heavily based on Deel's Design System components, which I estimate cut the time to build in half. On the same note, the assessment we used was based of another one from Deel, called Deel lab. This integration was also responsible for expediting engineering work in many weeks.

For this last one, I had to do some trade offs. The way the integration worked prevented me for designing an assessment experience from scratch. The results were only one of three options and didn't leave much room to explore a classification score, for example, which I wanted to implement.

• 15 user interviews across Shield and non-Shield clients
• 3 usability testing rounds → improved success rate 68% → 92%
• Close collaboration with PMs and engineering for data-driven prioritization
• Weekly async design reviews with Compliance and Customer Success teams

The PM and I decided on the KPIs and our targets were:

Shield awareness: 60%
Hub engagement: 40% of clients
Workforce assessments: 25% of clients
Shield conversions: +10%
Compliance support tickets: -10%

All of them were met or exceeded after the first month of releasing it to 10% of our user base.

This project reshaped how Deel frames compliance — from "avoid risk" to "stay ahead." It showed that embedding compliance into daily workflows builds both confidence and conversion. We stopped treating compliance as fine print and made it part of the product story.

• Data-driven design led to measurable business impact.
• Integrating internal tools saved ~6 weeks of build time.
• Design System reuse maintained quality and scalability.