0-to-1 financial planning & sales-on-rails app

Retirable offers financial advising to seniors. Retirable's sales funnel is punctuated by a free financial plan offering over a Zoom video call. If these calls go well, clients open accounts with Retirable (our “success” event). 

When I joined the company, the advisor team was lean and experienced; each advisor had disparate yet effective strategies for building clients' financial plans and opening accounts. However, with no unified tool for plan deliveries, advisors had to juggle different tools like 3rd party software, spreadsheets, voiceovers, and even live on-screen sketches to explain complex financial concepts during client presentations.

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We foresaw challenges with the growth of our Advisor team:

• Onboarding new, less experienced advisors was ad-hoc and time-consuming.
• Measuring the success of various plan delivery approaches was difficult.
• Client handoffs between advisors were time-consuming and disjointed for both parties.

Recognizing these challenges, we saw the need for a more structured Plan Delivery experience to:

• Streamline our sales process, boosting conversions.
• Establish a consistent customer experience (CX) for our clients.
• Create a "sales-on-rails" tool for swift onboarding and seamless, high-quality plan deliveries by new advisors.

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Understand

Duration: 3 days

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To kick off this project, I analyzed advisor plan presentation video recordings, noting:

• Key components of a successful plan delivery (e.g., core inputs, high-value concepts explained).
• Consistencies and discrepancies in advisors' order of operations.
• High-friction moments during the calls (ex, tool-switching, challenging concepts to explain, conflated jargon terms, etc.)

Additionally, I conducted interviews and shadowed our head of sales and new advisors, gaining insights into the nuances of onboarding, identifying learning curve challenges, and pinpointing gaps in resources and processes that made onboarding unclear.

Organizing these findings, I developed initial "north stars" for team alignment (my version of throwing spaghetti on the wall to kick off a productive conversation):

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North stars

• The project's problem statement: “We want to streamline our stage handoffs, our sales process, and our client actions so that we can build a larger advisor team that converts clients with high-throughput.”
• Our core personas and their relevant jobs to be done (JTBD) (these included our clients, seasoned advisors, and new advisors).
• A Plan Delivery "happy path."
• Measurable success metrics:

• New advisors deliver plans to clients within 3 weeks without supplementary materials.
• Existing advisors reduce tool/context switches from Opportunity to Account Open stages by 2 activities.
• Clients report a post-Plan Delivery confidence score of at least 8/10 on average.

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(Abridged) Product design sprint (Understand, Diverge)

Duration: 1 day

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I'm a big believer in the power of the Product Design Sprint (PDS) toolkit, but getting buy-in for a week-long commitment from a startup team is a tall order. To overcome this, I've developed an abbreviated PDS process that can be completed in an afternoon. I initiated this process with our CTO, Head of Sales, Head of Operations, and Engineering Manager.

Check out my abridged PDS Figjam template ✨

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We kicked off the session with time-boxed Expert Interviews and a review of my research findings. From there, we reviewed and refined our north stars: the personas, problem statement, and happy path user journey I prepared for the session, all while capturing assumptions and how-might-we (HMW) statements. From there, we rolled right into the more traditional Product Design Sprint Diverge exercises (lightning rounds, museum walk, crazy 8’s, and storyboarding).

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By the end of the afternoon, our team had:

• Aligned cross-functionally on a problem statement.
• Gained a clear understanding of our stakeholders' needs in this project.
• Crafted three primary personas, their respective jobs to be done (JTBD) and success events.
• Refined our "happy path" journey map.
• Identified high-value opportunities (how-might-we's) (these served as success metrics during user testing).
• Rapidly researched and generated ideas to solve our highest-value opportunities.
• Generated a list of assumptions that, if proven untrue, could threaten our project’s success.

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Check out our team's work in Figjam! ✨

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User Interviews and Prototype Iteration (Converge)

Duration: 3 weeks

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Using the findings and ideas generated from our afternoon PDS, I created and iterated on an initial prototype for our new plan delivery experience with our CTO. Around the time we hit ~65% confidence in our prototype, I began user testing. I tested the tool internally (with advisors of varying levels of seniority) and externally (with individuals who aligned with our target client persona), allowing time for rapid iteration between interview stints.

Over the next three weeks, I architected, refined, and stress-tested prototype iterations. The persona jobs-to-be-done, assumptions, and high-value opportunities (HMW’s) identified during our PDS served as primary success metrics for testing. 

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Designing for our top-voted How-might-we's (HMWs)

• How might we create an ‘itemized’ experience for advisors going through our user flow?

• How might we focus the advisor on completing the singular stage at hand? How might we reduce cognitive load for advisors during our CX?

• How might we  build out the plan builder stage to be flexible for multiple “happy paths”?

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I confidently delivered a validated, de-risked MVP proposal at the end of the three weeks. To keep our product team aligned, I delivered this work along with a handoff document, detailing:

• Additions to be made to our Design System  
• Accessibility goals, callouts, and best practices
• Behavioral nuances not readily apparent in the mockup/prototype handoff
• Our problem statement and the business goals we were aiming to accomplish with this work (along with non-goals and rabbit holes)
• The core user stories we set out to accomplish with our MVP

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➡️ Check out the full prototype here! ⬅️

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A note on change management

Because this project was for a hybrid internal/external tool, part of this process included necessary change management for our advisor team. Including the team in feedback cycles, regular updates, and user testing helps the team feel agency over this significant change to their advising/sales process. This project was a great opportunity to identify and build a shared company vernacular that better aligned our advisors, product teams, and customer experience.

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Success metrics

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Goal #1

‍New advisors can deliver plans to clients in 3 weeks without any supplementary materials.

Outcome - Success! 🎉

‍Post-launch, new advisors to join the Retirable team were initially given 3 weeks to onboard. The team soon confidently cut onboarding time to 2 weeks with no dip in client confidence scores. We effectively cut new advisor onboarding time by more than half.

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Goal #2

‍Existing advisors reduce the number of tools/context switches needed from the Opportunity stage to the Account Open stage by 2 activities.

Outcome - Success! 🎉

‍The Plan Delivery MVP was designed with this goal in mind; the functionality scoped included the highest-value utilities from disparate tools within the Advisors' arsenals. We were pleased to see that as advisors became increasingly comfortable with the new Plan Delivery experience (~1 month), it became rare for an advisor to reference another tool during a Plan Delivery call (ex: spreadsheet).

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Goal #3

‍Clients report an average confidence score post-Plan Delivery of at least 8/10.

Outcome - Success! 🎉

‍After one month of advisors using the new Plan Delivery tool, our team saw an increase in client confidence scores from 7/10 to 8.5/10.

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The Plan Delivery tool also helped our growing advisor team restructure their operations for scale. Clients presented with a plan delivery via our new productized plan delivery tool were much easier to reassign to new advisors, which allowed the team to scale with a significantly paired-down client handoff process.

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Looking forward

With a streamlined plan delivery process in place and a shared, cross-functional understanding of what success looked like for this product going forward, I was positioned to partner with product and sales to identify future high-value iterations for the experience. The project set the scaffolding for our advisor team's steady growth and increased conversion rate over the coming year.

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