The story of Sora

This is the story of an engineer and a People Ops coordinator.  The People Ops coordinator had a problem, and the engineer thought she could help.

The coordinator worked in People Ops because he enjoyed working with the people in his office and making it a better place for them all to work. But he constantly found himself buried under a pile of the same repetitive, manual tasks that came with working at a growing company. New hire emails to be sent, meetings to schedule, forms to fill out.

His team had a bunch of helpful tools to make this task and that task easier, but he still had to jump from one to the other to manually move an employee through the process. And so he would look for updates in a sea of emails, then go to the right tool to do the next step, and update the status in this big, complicated spreadsheet.

The People Ops coordinator thought to himself, why am I doing this one-by-one?

He explained his predicament to the engineer. And she thought she might be able to help him out. If she could write some scripts to help automate some of the monotonous, repetitive parts of his job, he could focus on the personal part of his job.

So she wrote a script to automatically send welcome emails to a new hire, and he focused on just making the email the best, most helpful email for the new hire. Then she wrote a script to send employees a survey, and he made sure the survey had the most useful questions. She wrote a script for this and she wrote a script for that, and he was able to spend his time making each interaction with each employee better and better.

And slowly but surely, the People Ops coordinator was able to climb out from under the pile of tasks. He was spending less time dealing with spreadsheets, and more time helping people. He was doing the things he joined People Ops to do.

But the engineer thought there were probably more people out there like the People Ops coordinator. Different people, at different companies, who were working in People Ops and who found themselves under their own pile of manual tasks.

And she wondered if she could create something to help all these people automate their own workflows, without having to have an engineer, without having to write complicated scripts.

And that was how Sora came to be.

Today Sora allows People Ops teams to take their workflows – workflows for onboarding a person, offboarding a person, transferring a person to a different team, or promoting a person to a new role – and automate and personalize those workflows.

Because People teams should spend their time working with people, not spreadsheets.