Reporting redesign

01. Context

We had just launched a new managed portfolio product to replace one of our most popular features: an automatic investment tool that had been a victim of its own success. As the loan market tightened, available assets shrank and investor diversification suffered. Regulators caught up. The product had to go.

The replacement was more sophisticated, more considered, and infinitely harder to explain. Where the old product was intuitive, set it, forget it, watch it diversify, the new one had moving parts: weekly repayments, actively managed asset pools, a rate of return users had never had to think about before.

The reporting page reflected all of that complexity without helping anyone make sense of it. Which, in a product that manages people's money, is a problem.

02. The problem

CS was drowning, and reporting was getting the blame. Investors were reaching out constantly, through emails, calls, and support tickets, trying to understand what their portfolio was doing. What were these weekly repayments? Was the return good or bad? How was the portfolio actually being managed?

I was brought in to fix the reporting experience. But within a week of digging in, I realized the reporting was not the root problem.

The product did not have a consistent story. Marketing was selling one version. Product was building another. Leadership was still figuring out the value proposition in real time. And investors were caught in the middle.

03. The conflict

I had to design alignment before I could design a product.

This meant uncomfortable rooms. I pulled together the PM, sales, and CS, people with genuinely different ideas of what the product was, and made them look at the contradictions at once: what we promised at acquisition, what the product actually delivered, what the reporting was showing.

Three different stories. One confused investor. It took multiple sessions. There was friction. But without a shared story, any design I shipped would just inherit the same confusion in a cleaner wrapper.

04. The solution

Don't display complexity. Explain simplicity.

Once we had one story, the design direction became obvious. Users didn't need to see two hundred plus individual assets. They needed to understand what was happening and whether their money was working. Two changes did most of the heavy lifting.

Artifact 1: Monthly update

Before

After

Why a narrative format instead of an improved table: a table implies the user should be doing something with the data. Managed portfolio investors are not operators, they are observers. A narrative format matches that mental model: something happened, here is what it means, here is what is next.

“We chose editorial over transactional deliberately. The right response to activity in a managed portfolio is a summary, not a spreadsheet.”

What we rejected: full loan by loan transparency. Two hundred plus identical rows created the appearance of complexity without delivering understanding. We replaced the full list with a top ten snapshot and moved detail into the newsletter, signal first, data on request.

Key insight: the bar chart is doing more work than it looks like. The monthly loan count chart is the first time users could see the portfolio growing over time. The “You joined” marker anchors their personal timeline to the portfolio's. That one element changed the read from “is anything happening” to “look how far this has come.”

Artifact 2: Rate of return

Rate of return is displayed prominently, tappable to open an explainer breaking down realized versus unrealized return. Transparent about what has been paid versus what is projected. Trust through honesty, not simplicity.

05. The outcome

Not because the product got simpler, it didn't, but because investors finally had the right frame to understand it. A confused investor isn't a disengaged investor. They are just missing context.

The most important design work on this project happened before I opened Figma. Defining the metric, brokering the story, forcing the contradictions into one room, that's not soft work. That's the work. Everything downstream got easier because we did it first.