Portfolio Investment Management
Visualizing complex investment relationships for managing $1T in assets.
Problem overview
Property investments happen behind closed doors.
Unlike the stock market, property investment performance is measured from spread sheets uploaded by individual property managers. Fund managers then have the daunting task of consolidating their thousands of investments into aggregate reports.
With so much to track, investors need help.
Investment managers need a tool allowing them to track their performance, receive data uploads, and organize their investments into normalized reporting. As an additional challenge, funds frequently have multiple parent-child relationships which demands extreme flexibility for investment visualization.
role
Design Lead
team
1 Engineering Team
1 Product Manager
1 Product Owner
2 Analysts
Business teams lacked critical insights into customer needs. As Design Lead, I implemented design strategy by teaching and leading human centered approaches to product development.
After aligning on problems, we architected, designed, and developed a new product aimed at alleviating pain points in an underserved industry.
You are not your user.
Subject matter experts within the company lacked critical understanding of user needs. While we knew a lot about portfolio management, current users were an enigma.
Created a virtual road trip across existing and new clients to capture pain points.
Consolidated pain points into affinity clusters.
Used workshops to prioritize user needs into business objectives.
“What investments do we have, what are we getting from them, and are they the best they can be?”
— Johann (Current User)
Product Design
After involving users, priorities shifted.
Users needed fully customizable platforms to match their reporting and management styles. Instead of developing for one size fits most, we shifted to creating a variety of tools aimed at financial experts who had stories to tell.
Visual communication of investment performance to a wide variety of stakeholders ranging from banks to individual investors.
Bottom up financial document intake with customized rule sets.
Reduced complexity of modeling holdings so more time can be spent on fine tuning returns.
Configurable dashboards allowed fund managers flexibility in their reporting. Client needs changed depending on the story needing to be told.
Detailed fund performance profiles allow managers complete overviews of performance down to a line item zoom level.
In context error messages help alleviate fund manager overhead as users uploading to the system can see errors before uploads complete.
Searchable investment structures make finding answers simple.
Visual representation of fund relationships allows managers ease of adding funds when multiple complex relationships exist.
Impact
650 Clients with $1T in investments managed.
After teaching the team how design thinking can accelerate our time to market, we secured multiple new client relationships by meeting key deadlines. The platform has since scaled to manage over $1T in investments.
The new platform requires fewer support calls (down 34%) and results in faster setup times for new clients – down from 7 days to 3.
Most of all, I’m proud of the team for embracing new processes they were originally skeptical of.