Introducing the Org Designer

A free tool to design your ideal team: with roles, projects, compensation, and fully loaded cost... all in 15 minutes.

Aug 31, 2025

Contents

Why we Built the Org Designer Why The Org Designer is free(!)How It Works: A Step-by-Step Guide

Why we Built the Org Designer Why modeling headcount is deceptively hard How it can be done better: The Org Designer Use cases: First Draft, New Exec, and Use of Proceeds Why The Org Designer is free(!)How It Works: A Step-by-Step Guide 1. Plan Settings 2. Describe Current Team 3. Spend Baseline 4. Initiatives 5. Initiative Resourcing 6. Finalize Role Details 7. Export & Share

Why we Built the Org Designer

Headcount planning is a familiar, often painful ritual for finance, people, and executive leaders at high-growth companies. It always involves a tangled web of spreadsheets (vF2 FINAL Dec 23 ring a bell?); disconnected conversations between finance, HR, and functional leaders; and a constant struggle to align hiring with goals.

The most critical decisions at a company are resourcing decisions. And the toughest resourcing decisions are made at the margin. Deciding whether to scale a sales team when you have crazy product-market fit is easy! But… how should the last 5 hires be split, between design or engineering, sales vs. customer success? Those are the hard decisions. This is always a guessing game (not to mention, often a political one).

Why modeling headcount is deceptively hard

Headcount planning isn’t just about heads but costs. Headcount cost is 80% of OpEx at most companies. Everything else is almost rounding error compared to headcount cost. Despite this weight, it is surprisingly hard-to-model (and is often poorly modeled):

“We need 5 people in product marketing” → There is a big difference — in capability and in compensation — between a Director of Product Marketing and a PMM

“We should hire a VP of Data Science” → have we considered the team that needs to be hired to fully staff the data science initiative?

“Our L5 engineers make $150K base, so a team of 6 = $900K” → What about payroll taxes? Benefits? Software licenses? And annual bonuses, if you do them?

“Let’s hire a Director of CX, 4 CSMs, and 2 CX Associates” → Are we hiring them in NYC or Nashville? The US or EMEA or Philippines?

This is why headcount planning is hard. Even if you know which choices to make, and even if you could make quick, reasonable decisions on the best needs of the business… every single choice requires research and expert input from different functions.

High level budget from the CEO, CFO & Execs

Correct seniority from Hiring Managers and HRBPs

Compensation by level and location from Recruiting and Total Rewards

Fully-loaded costs (taxes / benefits) from Accounting

Financial model from FP&A

This disconnect creates slow, reactive planning cycles, quickly outdated budgets, and a lack of clarity that creates a start-and-stop process — at a time when you need to be moving fast.

How it can be done better: The Org Designer

Instead of either a bottom-up or top-down process, the easiest headcount planning process — like most decisions that span strategy and execution — is shaped like a W.

Enter The Org Designer, a tool that transforms this chaotic process into a streamlined, strategic exercise.

Sure you can go build a spreadsheet to do this. But here’s why a simple, flexible platform is way, way better:

Quick, simple settings to estimate multipliers for fully-loaded costs

Strong out-of-the-box compensation framework and estimates, powered by fairoffer.ai

Support for location-based adjustments

Identify initiatives and tie roles back to them

Fine-tune every role’s compensation, start date, and title

Visualize resourcing by team, by initiative, by baseline vs. new

The Org Designer helps you translate high-level strategy directly into a detailed headcount plan. Once you have the right strategy and high-level gut sense, you can build it out in 15 minutes — not 10+ hours. As you make decisions, you see the financial impact instantly, turning guesswork into confident forecasting.

Use cases: First Draft, New Exec, and Use of Proceeds

This approach creates powerful new workflows for critical business moments.

The best first draft ever.

No plan survives contact with the market… so don’t spend dozens of hours on a spreadsheet plan that's obviously going to be still wrong.

The Org Designer gives you a first draft in <30 minutes, powered by comp from fairoffer.ai.

Resourcing plan for new execs.

Let's say you just joined a fast-growing company as C-Suite or VP. The Org Designer helps you build a first draft of your dream team, without having to ask finance or HR for inputs.

Telegraph leadership by showing up with a prepared mind on day 1.

Use of proceeds in VC.

It's 2 AM. You're deep in putting together your data room for VC diligence. You just finished your customer cohort analysis.

Now you need to come up with a "use of proceeds" — where your company will invest the dollars over the next two years.

The Org Designer is here to help. Assemble a directional allocation of resources (existing team + new hires) quickly. Then go get some shut-eye.

Why The Org Designer is free(!)

We’re excited to share that The Org Designer is entirely free to sign up and use. We don’t even ask for a credit card.

Pragmatic reasons: People won’t pay for it.

This is often a one-time exercise.

You can do it in a spreadsheet.

Doing good: We like building useful things to benefit the ecosytem.

We’ve built half a dozen tools like The Fair Offer, The Culture Compass, The Weighing Machine, and more… to help demystify things that seem complicated, but only because they lack structure.

We believe that giving away things that are worth thousands of dollars has compounding benefits for the ecosystem.

The long game: Today’s users of The Org Designer are Tomorrow’s users of Autograph

The Org Designer’s ideal user is an exec, finance, or people leader at a fast-growing company that might have 100 or 200 people. Autograph serves mid-market and enterprise, so it doesn’t necessarily make sense for them today. But it will in a year or two.

We believe in being long-term greedy: cultivating strong, long-term relationships through consistent customer value creation, rather than pursuing quick ARR or short-term valuations.

By building smaller, useful things today, we can better understand our customers needs and pain points, and get feedback.

How It Works: A Step-by-Step Guide

The Org Designer helps founders turn messy hiring assumptions into a clear, defensible plan.

Instead of wrestling with spreadsheets and back of the envelope math, it gives you a structured way to capture company stage, comp philosophy, and both your current and future team… and ends with an exportable roadmap of whom to hire, when, and at what cost.

It’s designed to give you three things at once: speed in getting to a first draft; confidence via sanity checks that your plan makes sense; and a solid, clear story you can share with your team and your investors.

1. Plan Settings

This first step is the most critical, as it defines the core financial and strategic assumptions that will power all subsequent calculations. Getting this right ensures your plan is realistic and defensible.

Time Horizon

Define the start and end dates for your plan. This is usually 18-24 months, often aligning with funding rounds if you’re a VC backed company. The “Plan Duration” will update automatically, setting the scope for all your decisions within this plan.

Compensation Philosophy

This is where you tell the model how to benchmark compensation. This drives the automatic salary recommendations for every role, which you can always override later. Learn more about Autograph’s compensation prediction model here.

Stage & Cash Balance: Select your company’s funding stage and approximate cash balance. The options for cash balance will dynamically update based on the stage you select.

Bonus Policy: Specify whether your company offers “Strong,” “Modest,” or “None.” This directly adjusts the target bonus calculations for non-commissioned roles.

Location-Based Adjustments: Toggle this on if you have a distributed team and want to apply cost-of-living adjustments to compensation. You’ll be able to set zones for each department and even individual roles later.

Configure Costs

This is where you set the global, fully-loaded cost multipliers.

Tax Multiplier: This accounts for employer-side payroll taxes (FICA in the US). A common starting point is 8-10%.

Annual Benefits & SaaS Cost: Enter the average annual cost per employee for benefits (health insurance, etc.) and software licenses / SaaS cost. This ensures your plan reflects the true cost of each hire beyond just their salary.

Don’t worry about bonuses just yet; you’ll add that per-role later on.

2. Describe Current Team

Here, you’ll create a snapshot of your organization as it stands today. This establishes the “baseline” that forms the foundation for future growth.

Add Departments

Start by clicking “Add Departments” to select from a list of pre-configured departments (like Engineering, Sales) or create your own custom ones.

Add Roles for each Level

For each department, you’ll see one card per level. Add the number of employees you have in each. Each level comes pre-loaded with suggested salary and bonus based on our fairoffer.ai compensation model, but you can adjust their salary and bonus easily.

Expanding a Level: Click the arrow next to any level to expand it and see the individual roles inside. You can assign custom job titles, override compensation for specific roles.

Locked Counts: If you override details for an individual role, you won’t be able to adjust comp and headcount for the level as a whole — they will be 🔒 locked. This prevents your bottom-up individual role compensation from being changed by top-down level compensation.

You can still edit roles, add roles, and remove roles at the individual level, though:

You can also reset the locked value at any time, which will also remove all overrides for that level.

3. Spend Baseline

Now you can review your work so far, with a “Current Team” summary. It’s your chance to sanity-check your current organization’s financial footprint before planning for the future.

Key Metrics

At the top, you’ll see summary cards for your current team size, monthly burn, average fully-loaded cost per employee, total annualized spend, and total spend over the plan duration.

Visual Breakdowns

View stacked bar charts showing how your employees are distributed across different departments and seniority levels. You’ll see two charts side by side: one for Team Headcount and the other for Annual Spend.

How to Use This Step

Look for surprises. Is one department disproportionately expensive? Is your team structure more top-heavy than you realized? Use the interactive tooltips on the charts to drill down into the numbers. If something looks off, you can easily navigate back to the previous step to make corrections.

4. Initiatives

Now it’s time to move from capturing the present to planning the future. Instead of just adding random roles, you’ll link every future hire to a strategic business goal.

Define your Initiatives

Add your key initiatives for the planning period: major milestones to drive the business forward.

Quick Add initiatives, or Add your own custom initiatives by entering them into the text box.

Customize Everything: Click on the initiative name to edit it. You can assign a category, icon, and specific start date for the initiative. These initiatives effectively act as tags to helps you model when hiring for that initiative needs to begin.

5. Initiative Resourcing

This step provides a powerful grid where you’ll allocate your future hires. It’s designed for rapid, high-level planning.

The Role Allocation Grid

The rows represent seniority levels, and the columns represent your departments. Enter values into each cell to add hires (e.g., 3 new Senior Software Engineers). You can add departments as needed.

Initiative Tabs

Use the tabs at the top to switch between the initiatives you created in the previous step. Plan the hiring needed for each goal independently.

How to Get the Most Out of It

Add Headcount: Simply type a number into a cell to add that many roles. The system automatically assigns a calculated, market-rate compensation. You can edit the compensation for specific roles in the next step.

Show Fully Loaded Costs: Click this checkbox to see the true cost of hiring in each cell, including taxes and benefits.

Show Heatmap: This checkbox colors the cells based on hiring density, giving you an instant visual of where your biggest investments are being made for the selected initiative.

6. Finalize Role Details

This is where you go from a high-level plan to a granular, operational one. You can review and edit every single planned hire across all initiatives.

By Department or By Initiative

Toggle between “By Department” and “By Initiative” to review your plan from different angles. This helps you see both what a specific department’s growth looks like and how a single initiative impacts multiple departments.

An Editable Table of All Roles

Each row represents a planned hire. You can:

Assign Specific Titles: Choose from a list of typical titles for that role’s level and department, or create a new custom title.

Edit Start Dates: Set a precise start date for each hire to model a realistic hiring ramp.

Override Compensation: If you know a role requires a non-standard salary or bonus, you can override the calculated value here. A sparkle icon will appear to remind you that you’ve made a manual change. You can always revert to the original, default value for that level by clicking 🔄.

7. Export & Share

This final step is your executive summary and export hub. It consolidates all your planning into a clean, presentation-ready dashboard.

Growth Summary: At the top, you’ll find a clear, concise summary of how your team size and monthly burn will change over the planning period.

Visual Dashboards: The charts on this page visualize your growth trajectory, showing how headcount and spend will evolve month by month. Use the toggle to see the data broken down by department or by initiative.

Detailed Tables: Review the full breakdown of your current and planned teams. You can expand each section to see the specific roles and their associated costs.

Export to CSV: With one click on the “Export Complete Plan” button, you can download a detailed CSV file containing every current employee and planned hire, with a full breakdown of their compensation. This file is ready to be imported directly into your master financial model or shared with stakeholders.