The problem
The company was growing its investor base but had no investor-facing product. Information about contracts and returns flowed through internal teams manually — which worked, barely, until the base got too big. Then the communication broke down.
Investors couldn't see their own portfolio. They had to reach out to get basic information. In a financial product, that kind of friction becomes a trust problem fast. The risk of losing investor confidence was real and growing.
Approach
I didn't wait for a project brief. I talked directly to the company's most engaged investors — asked what information they actually needed, what they were missing, what made them anxious about not knowing. Those conversations became the product proposal.
I built a functional prototype before the app was officially approved — not to show what it would look like, but to prove it was worth building. I took it directly to the founders. They approved it.
Before any code was written, we ran a live validation session with investors at an in-person event. The feedback was immediate and specific. I used it to reprioritize features, documented flows and components, aligned with engineering on scope, and shipped the first version.
Investor dashboard
Contract view
Returns & portfolio
Outcome
CSAT went up. Investors became more autonomous — they could track their own contracts, follow their returns, and stopped depending on internal teams for information that should have been at their fingertips all along.
Data governance improved significantly. Information that used to live in spreadsheets and emails moved into a structured, reliable product.
What this project reinforced is that some of the most valuable design work happens before any design tool is open. Identifying that the product needed to exist, and convincing the right people to build it, was as important as designing the app itself.
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