Customer story

Workforce Directory ships features with the reasoning written down first

A marketplace connecting Australian businesses with over 6,000 HR, recruitment, payroll and safety providers. Specs and architecture decisions are written before an agent touches the code, so the reasoning behind each change survives the change.

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At a glance

Company Workforce Directory Australia — HR, recruitment, payroll and safety provider marketplace

Where Australia · 6,000+ listed suppliers

Used for Specifying, deciding and shipping roadmap features end to end

Features AI-generated PRDs, AI build agents, GitHub PR automation

Stack WordPress · GitHub · PHP

1hr

Time from spec to open pull request

100%

Share of PRs merged without rework

Engineering hours returned per month

The challenge

A two-sided roadmap, one small team

Two audiences pulling in different directions

HR buyers want better search and matching; listed vendors want profile, verification and lead tooling. Both queues grow at once.

Search and matching logic is the product

Changes to how service areas match a query affect every buyer. They need a written rationale, not a quick patch.

Decisions were living in people's heads

Why a matching rule or subscription tier worked a certain way existed in Slack threads, so every revisit started from scratch.

The method

Every feature has a paper trail

AI-generated PRDs →

Artefact 01 PRD The request, the affected surface, the acceptance criteria — drafted from the signals behind it.

A generated PRD with problem statement, desired outcome and user stories

Artefact 02 ADR The architecture decision and the options rejected, recorded in the repo alongside the code.

Architectural decisions confirmed by analysing the codebase, each one ready to confirm or override

Artefact 03 Pull request The diff, the test run and links back to both documents, ready for review.

Completed agent runs with a linked pull request for each one, ready to open and review

Redact customer data; get sign-off before publishing.

One feature, start to finish

Image upload compression optimizations

Business profiles could carry a logo, but nothing else — vendors had no way to show their work. The feature adds a full image pipeline: businesses upload photos, VocxAI compresses them on the way in, and an S3-backed service serves the optimized versions on the public profile, so listings load real photos without the page-weight problem an unoptimized upload path would have caused.

Origin Vendor signal — businesses wanted photos on their listings

Artefacts PRD · ADR · pull request

Spec to PR 1 hour

Reviewed by Workforce Directory engineer

The live chat widget open on the Workforce Directory site, with fields for name, email and a message

Also shipped

Live chat enquiry form

A chat widget on the business profile lets customers send a question straight from the listing. Messages route to the business's inbox by email, so vendors don't need an account or a new system to start answering enquiries.

How it runs

Their loop, feature to feature

Step 01

Request becomes a PRD

A roadmap item is written up as a spec with acceptance criteria before any code exists.

Reviewed by the team

Step 02

An ADR records the call

Where the change touches search, matching or billing, the decision and its alternatives are written down.

Reviewed by the team

Step 03

Agent builds against both

The agent works from the PRD and ADR in a sandboxed clone and runs the test suite.

Cost tracked live

Step 04

PR arrives with its documents

The pull request links the spec and the decision record, so review starts with the reasoning.

Their decision

Spec before code, always

No job starts without an approved PRD. The spec is the unit of work, not a prompt.

Decisions live in the repo

ADRs are committed next to the code, so the next change inherits the reasoning.

Only the repos you choose

Scoped to the repos Workforce Directory selects, with write limited to branches and pull requests.

Human review on every PR

Nothing merges without a Workforce Directory reviewer.

The tool is awesome. The specs and tasks were accurate first time, and it made additional improvement suggestions. Having every step documented is impressive.

Darren Cutts, Founder & CEO Workforce Directory Australia