Backstory
Property investments often happen behind closed doors. Unlike the stock market, where performance is easy to track, property investment performance relied on spreadsheets uploaded by individual property managers. Fund managers then faced the overwhelming task of consolidating thousands of investments into aggregate reports.
With so much to monitor, investors needed help. Investment managers required a tool to track their performance, receive data uploads, and organize investments into standardized reports. An added challenge was that funds frequently had multiple parent-child relationships, requiring extreme flexibility for investment visualization.
The Challenge
Business teams lacked crucial insights into customer needs. As the Design Lead, I implemented a design strategy by teaching and leading human-centered approaches to product development. After aligning on the problems, we architected, designed, and developed a new product to address pain points in an underserved industry.
Discovery
We recognized that subject matter experts within the company didn't fully understand user needs. Although we knew a lot about portfolio management, our current users were still a mystery. I took the following steps:
- Created a virtual road trip across existing and new clients to capture pain points.
- Consolidated pain points into affinity clusters.
- Facilitated workshops to prioritize user needs and align them with business objectives.
One of our users, Johann, summarized their main concern:
"What investments do we have, what are we getting from them, and are they the best they can be?"
Ideation
After involving users, our priorities shifted. Users needed fully customizable platforms to match their unique reporting and management styles. Instead of building a one-size-fits-most solution, we created a variety of tools aimed at financial experts who had stories to tell.
Key focus areas included:
- Visual communication of investment performance to different stakeholders, from banks to individual investors.
- Bottom-up financial document intake with customized rule sets.
- Reducing complexity in modeling holdings so users could spend more time fine-tuning returns.
We developed configurable dashboards, allowing fund managers the flexibility to adapt their reports based on the story they needed to share. Detailed fund performance profiles enabled managers to view complete performance overviews, even down to individual line items.
Implementation
- We integrated in-context error messages, helping reduce fund manager overhead by allowing users to see upload errors before completing the process.
- We created searchable investment structures, making it easier to find specific answers.
- We visualized fund relationships to help managers quickly add funds, even when multiple complex relationships existed.
Impact
The platform now serves 650 clients, managing over $1 trillion in investments.
By teaching the team how design thinking could accelerate our time to market, we secured multiple new client relationships by meeting key deadlines. The redesigned platform resulted in:
- 34% fewer support calls due to improved usability
- Faster setup times for new clients, reduced from 7 days to 3
Most importantly, I’m proud that the team embraced new processes they were initially skeptical about, allowing us to deliver a more efficient and user-centered product.