Simplifying investment portfolio management for advisors

Brokers and independent investment agents played a central role in acquiring clients, managing relationships, and supporting investment decisions. The platform was their primary workspace for reviewing portfolios, tracking investments, and responding to client needs.

However, the homepage did not reflect how they worked. Essential information was fragmented, frequently used actions were difficult to reach, and advisors spent unnecessary time navigating the platform or creating their own workarounds.

Our challenge was to improve the homepage and introduce new capabilities that could make portfolio management clearer, faster, and better aligned with the advisors' workflow.

I joined a lean squad with another Product Designer, a Product Manager, and two developers. We began by combining quantitative research, interviews, and competitive analysis to understand how advisors used the platform and where it created friction.

The research revealed that users struggled to find essential information such as client balances and navigate between investment options. Profitability information was not consolidated, forcing some advisors to capture screenshots and assemble information manually when serving clients.

The demand extended beyond the homepage. Advisors also requested SMS authentication, easier registration updates, and a prospecting history that could help them manage potential clients.

The research uncovered several legitimate needs, but our small squad could not address all of them within the same release. The challenge became deciding which improvements would create the greatest effect for advisors and the business.

We ran ideation and prioritization workshops with stakeholders, evaluating opportunities through usage frequency, impact on client service, business relevance, and technical feasibility. The Product Manager and I translated the research into a clearer product direction and a sequence the team could realistically deliver.

The homepage became the foundation. We focused first on improving access to essential portfolio information and frequently used actions, while the remaining opportunities informed the broader roadmap.

We redesigned the homepage around the information and actions advisors needed most. The new hierarchy made client balances and portfolio context easier to scan, improved navigation between investment options, and brought important management capabilities into a more coherent structure.

We also addressed a blind spot beyond the homepage: advisors were not always aware when clients had uninvested money. An email alert brought those balances to their attention so they could follow up.

Instead of treating the homepage as a visual refresh, we used it to clarify how the wider platform should be organized. Each decision considered how quickly an advisor could understand a client's situation and move toward the next relevant action.

We tested the new flows remotely with key investment managers using Maze. Their feedback helped us refine the hierarchy, improve feature discoverability, and resolve navigation issues before development.

Testing also gave stakeholders a clearer view of how the proposed changes addressed the problems found in research. It moved the conversation from individual feature requests toward the quality of the complete advisor workflow.

The redesign received unsolicited positive feedback from major clients, shared directly with business stakeholders. Although the project did not begin with a formal measurement framework, this feedback provided qualitative evidence that the new experience addressed meaningful friction for advisors.

The project also helped demonstrate Design as a tangible contributor to product value. Its research methods, prioritization approach, and design decisions influenced improvements in other product areas and helped strengthen the company's design culture.

This experience changed how I approached measurement. Because it was my first project at the company, we had not established baselines or success metrics early enough to quantify the outcome after launch. From that point forward, I began bringing data into the initial product conversations, defining success measures during discovery, and ensuring projects could be evaluated through evidence.

Client validation

Unsolicited positive feedback from major clients

Business recognition

Design recognized as a contributor to product value

Organizational influence

Project learnings applied across other product areas

A more measurable process

Success metrics and baseline data introduced earlier in later projects

This project reinforced that improving a strategic platform is not about adding every requested feature. It requires understanding how people work, identifying the moments that create the most friction, and deciding where design can deliver the greatest value.

By connecting user needs, business priorities, and technical constraints, we transformed a broad collection of requests into a focused product direction that advisors, stakeholders, and other teams could understand and support.