Employee no. 6 at a fintech startup
Design leadership
Product management
Growth strategy
OVERVIEW
- First designer at Treasure
- Owned the design of our entire product and site
- Conducted org design for the design org
- Designed our MVP from the ground floor
Empathize
Understanding financial managers
A key part of my design process is cultivating deep understanding. In this case, I read several books on treasury management, cold emailed CFOs for user research, and took a youtube course by Robert Schiller from Yale on financial markets (which was super interesting).
Define
Defining the solution
At Treasure I focused on mapping the solution space by creating personas, journey maps, and mental model diagrams. Since we had a great head of product, I did not get to write requirements like I did at JITX, so I influenced our solution parameters in brainstorming sessions and by sharing knowledge I'd gathered in user/domain research.
A minor note: the above journey map documents a high-touch onboarding flow fed by sales-driven customer acquistion. This is something I advocated strenously against, since I believed our average annual revenue per user warranted a leaner, bottom-up acquisition/customer success strategy.
Ideate
Exploring solutions
Are these wireframes somewhat ugly? Yes. But just like street food, they serve a delicious purpose. Albeit a different purpose: They helped us figure out the relative priority and flow of different features on our home screen in a rapid and concrete way.
Ideate
Exploring solutions
My early sketches were not saved for this project, however, the following are exercepts from the wireframes and prototypes I created to help realize our vision.
Prototype
Making our ideas real
What is my prototyping process? Find the cross-product of your best early ideation with a set of realistic scenarios. Test the results by using them yourself and triangulate with other users.
Prototype
Making our ideas real
I think you get what prototypes are, so instead, let me wax philosophical on something I learned at Treasure: Good leadership means eliciting spontaneous action from people that is more effective, more creative, and just better than you would have done yourself.
test
Assessing and improving performance
Ethnographic interviews
Informal usability tests
A big missed opportunity at Treasure was not creating a staging environment with fake data where all of us could regularly test the product ourselves. We ran usability tests on our designs and had great user conversations, but truly great design work requires user empathy and there is not better fuel for empathy than using your product regularly yourself. At JITX, we were very diligent about doing this and it paid huge dividends.