“Finally, a compensation platform that gets the fundamentals right.”
How CHRO and HR Tech Advisor Sherri Manning Sees the Future of Compensation Technology
A Career Spent Inside Compensation
After more than twenty years leading compensation strategy through IPOs, private equity transitions, and global expansion, Sherri Manning has seen the inside of nearly every HR and compensation platform on the market. A former CHRO and now advisor to both boards and HR technology companies, she understands what separates a product that looks impressive in a demo from one that truly works for compensation and HR leaders.
With that experience, she has a simple way of assessing new compensation platforms: does it truly understand how compensation works in practice?
Where Technology and Data Fall Short
“Many tools are built by technologists and data scientists who don’t really understand the business of compensation,” she says. “They focus on technology and data, but skip the foundation that everything else depends on. Even the best data can be misleading if it isn’t grounded in job architecture and real compensation logic.”
That foundation, Sherri explains, is the missing link across most modern tools. Job architecture defines how roles, levels, and pay connect. It is the framework that ensures data reflects reality, not surface-level assumptions. And if the underlying structure is not right, speed only gets you faster to the wrong answer. Titles can drift from what the job really is. Levels can be misaligned across teams and regions.
The Hard Work That Can’t Be Skipped
Sherri knows how much effort it takes to build job architecture properly. At both BigCommerce and Olo, she led transformations where creating job architecture required months of interviews with managers, analysis of job descriptions, and careful mapping of career paths.
“To do it well, you have to go beneath the title and understand the work itself,” she says. “You’re aligning structure, pay, and progression. It’s meticulous, detailed work that takes real time.”
A Platform Built on Real Expertise
That is why the CompWizard platform immediately caught her attention. “It’s the only platform I’ve seen that can deliver job architecture with true richness and flexibility,” she says. “No one else in the market has it. CompWizards did the hard work to make sure the data maintains integrity. It looks beyond job titles and examines the work itself through a job architecture lens. That’s what builds trust in the results.”
Sherri describes the platform as both powerful and approachable. “You can start with the wizard for a quick, accurate baseline or dive deeper in expert mode to customize it to your company’s structure,” she says. “Either way, the foundation is strong. It feels like it was designed by people who actually understand how compensation professionals think.”
Transparency in the Age of AI
Transparency, she adds, will define the next generation of HR technology. “As AI becomes more common in compensation analytics, transparency is critical,” she says. “You need to know how the data is processed, how bias is managed, and how analytics are performed. CompWizard shows you that. It’s open about its logic, and that builds confidence.”
Faster, Smarter, and Built on Experience
Sherri has seen how CompWizard changes both the speed and accuracy of compensation design. “Building job architecture from scratch can take months,” she says. “CompWizard compresses that process while maintaining depth and rigor. It’s not just faster. It’s smarter.”
For her, that combination of intelligence, transparency, and real-world grounding is what makes the platform stand apart. “There’s both an art and a science to compensation,” she says. “CompWizard captures both. It’s rare to find a platform that understands compensation at this depth, and you can feel that it was built by people who’ve done the work.”