Reward Vision gave every employee an equal monthly budget of recognition tokens — not to spend on themselves, but to send to colleagues whose work had actually moved them forward. By month's end, the graph of who-sent-to-whom said more about the real shape of a company than any org chart.
Role
Founder & Product Designer
Products
B2B SaaS - Employee Experience
Dates
2018 - 2020
Same tokens for everyone. Different signal at the end of the month.
What managers see vs. what actually holds a team together.
Performance reviews capture what managers see. They miss most of what holds a team together — the colleague who unblocks a problem in five minutes, the senior who quietly mentors three juniors, the partner who answers a Slack at midnight. That layer of contribution is invisible until you ask people to point at it directly, with skin in the game.
"Equal allocation by design, asymmetric outcome by usage. Everyone votes; the resulting graph reads as a map of trust."
A token app, a graph, and a question about who owns reputation.
A token-allocation app paired with an analytics layer. Employees redistributed monthly tokens to colleagues whose work had helped them. The system tracked the graph and surfaced patterns: top connectors, isolated nodes, cross-team flows. The same mechanic extended outward — to suppliers, clients, external partners — giving the company a second map of the relationships that actually drove value beyond its walls.
The whole thing was anchored on blockchain — not for crypto, but for immutability. We wanted the record of recognition to belong to the individual receiving it, portable, irrevocable, eventually carry-able from job to job.
A pilot that worked as a research instrument.
Reward Vision shipped as an MVP and ran inside one host company as an internal pilot. The data was the part that worked: the graph genuinely surprised the org, and named contributors the org hadn't been tracking. The product side never reached commercial scale, and we moved on.
What we built has aged interestingly. Peer recognition is a real product category now, and the question we cared about most — should your professional reputation belong to you, not to your employer? — is now back on the table under the heading of portable identity. We were early on the mechanic, and earlier still on the assumption underneath it.