Reporting redesign
A managed portfolio reporting redesign, and the alignment work nobody put in the brief.
Role
Solo Product Designer
Industry
Fintech
Timeline
4 weeks
Team
Solo designer, 1 PM, 5 engineers
Challenge
A new managed portfolio product replaced a simple, popular one, and reporting had to explain something far more complex than “set it and forget it” ever needed to, while CS drowned in confused investor tickets.
Approach
Designed alignment before designing the interface, marketing, product, and leadership were each telling a different story about what the product was. I forced one shared story before touching a single screen.
Result
Avoidable customer support contacts dropped 12% within three months, without the underlying product getting any simpler.
Context
- The old product was intuitive: set it, forget it, watch it diversify. Its replacement had weekly repayments, actively managed asset pools, and a rate of return investors had never had to think about before
- CS was drowning in tickets asking what was happening with their money, and reporting was getting the blame
- The real problem wasn't the interface: marketing sold one version of the product, product built another, leadership was still defining the value proposition in real time, three stories reaching one confused investor
The Alignment Work
- Pulled together PM, sales, and CS, people with genuinely different ideas of what the product was, and forced them to look at the contradictions at once: what we promised at acquisition, what the product delivered, what reporting showed
- Took multiple sessions and real friction to land on one shared story
- Without that shared story, any design I shipped would have just inherited the same confusion in a cleaner wrapper
Decision: Don’t Display Complexity, Explain Simplicity
Before
After
Before
Balance and dividend visible, no rate of return, no performance trend, no narrative, numbers without meaning.
After
A monthly narrative, portfolio stats, and a loan-activity chart anchored to the investor's own join date.
Why
A table implies the user should act on the data. Managed portfolio investors are observers, not operators, a narrative format matches that mental model: something happened, here's what it means, here's what's next.
What we rejected
Full loan-by-loan transparency, 200+ identical rows created the appearance of complexity without delivering understanding. Replaced with a top-ten snapshot, detail moved to on-request.
Key insight
The loan-activity chart did more work than it looked like, it was the first time investors could see the portfolio growing since they joined, changing the read from “is anything happening” to “look how far this has come.”
“We chose editorial over transactional, deliberately. The right response to activity in a managed portfolio is a summary, not a spreadsheet.”
We also brought Rate of Return out of hiding, previously not displayed at all, now shown prominently and tappable into a plain-language breakdown of realized versus unrealized return. Transparent about what's been paid versus projected, trust through honesty, not simplicity.
Outcome
-12%
avoidable CS contacts within three months of launch (roughly 29 → 26 per period)
- Not because the product got simpler, it didn't, but because investors finally had the right frame to understand it
- The most important design work here happened before Figma ever opened: defining the shared story, forcing the contradictions into one room
Want the full research, the artifacts I rejected, and the reasoning behind every smaller decision? Email me, I'd love to walk you through it.