Vibechex is a concept for a workplace burnout-prevention service targeting mid-size tech organizations, including a manager dashboard, an IC-facing Slack check-in flow, grounded in peer-reviewed burnout research and competitive analysis of eight existing tools.
MANAGEMENT
DESIGN
PRODUCT
Problem
The tools that track work have a record of how people are operating. None of them surface what that record implies about burnout risk. The tools that do exist for employee wellness either ask people to self-report honestly into a system their manager controls, or they show individual-level behavioral data that functions as surveillance regardless of intent. ICs under pressure don't report accurately because the system gives them no reason to trust it.
Solution
The central design decision was to make the manager's view and the IC's view identical. Whatever the manager sees on the V.I.B.E.S. [Volume, Isolation, Boundaries, Energy, Support] A team-level aggregate derived from passive workflow signals.
• The V.I.B.E.S. scoring system to composite five behavioral dimensions — workload volume, team isolation, boundary violations, energy proxies, and help-seeking behavior. • Ran an anonymity experiment comparing self-reported burnout levels in anonymous vs. identified survey conditions, directly testing the core assumption that fear of visibility suppresses honest reporting. • Mapped a two-persona journey across 11 weeks to ground interface decisions in a documented progression based on Leclercq & Hansez (2024)'s temporal burnout stages. • Pivoted the business model from a white-label embedded API approach to direct-to-organization SaaS, a decision driven by competitive analysis showing that the target platforms (Culture Amp, 15Five, Lattice) are potential acquirers, not distribution partners.