Lead Product Designer
Product Owner, Project Manager, Strategist/Support Product Designer, Lead Engineer
Growth Operators was built on the vision that too many companies were constrained by under-developed finance, accounting and human resources capabilities. Growth Operators are executives and managers who created a new kind of advisory firm, backed by their collective expertise, that works to transform finance, accounting, and human resources issues to help their clients generate maximum growth.
We conducted a workshop with a group of product champions (both users and stakeholders) from Growth Operators. The workshop focused on identifying the objectives that the nextLevel® assessment tool must achieve and understanding the requirements needed to make those objectives a reality.
Workshop goals included:
After the workshop, we tested stakeholder and product champion assumptions through a series of user interviews. This enabled us to understand where additional alignment would be necessary for adoption. I planned, conducted, and synthesized the stakeholder interviews at this stage.
Discoveries included:
The work done in the workshop and the discovery research were synthesized into an Insights Document that guided the next phase of the project, including design and build of the app.
We ideated on potential user flows for consultants to complete an assessment and generate reports. We knew that we needed to be able to generate 2 report types: one being a diagnostic report and the other being a progress report. We considered 2 potential paths for doing so: (1) create assessments specific to each report type or (2) the assessment acts as a single source of truth that either report can be generated from. We ultimately moved forward with option 2 since it allowed for the potential of additional report types in the future.
Sketching out the main screens of the user flow helped us put things into context and think about the design in greater detail. It became clear to us pretty quickly that Growth Pros are going to want to jump around the assessment and fill out information as they receive it, rather than a more linear flow. For this reason, we began iterating on a “spreadsheet” inspired design for the assessment.
Before investing too much time into designing an interface, we decided to do some rapid prototyping that we could use to gather feedback on our initial direction. I designed the assessment prototype and conducted a portion of the interviews, taking notes for the others, and synthesized findings with the other designer on my team.
Study goals included:
I took our synthesized findings and turned them into actionable next steps, and prioritized using the Now/Next/Later framework. This allowed us to see what is necessary for an initial release, what is a fast follow, and what is out of scope at this time, but should be considered in the future.
In order to move quickly, but maintain consistency (and make our engineers lives easier), I built out a component library. This made it easy for myself and the other designer to collaborate and iterate as we explored solutions.
Based on user feedback during product testing, we maintained the "spreadsheet" style design. We added additional navigation options that will help Growth Operators as they jump around an assessment, such as column filtering and improved hierarchy. We also believe that the search functionality will be especially beneficial when it comes to power users.
The customer-facing reports is Growth Operators opportunity to put their best foot forward. We wanted the design to be professional and polished, and reflect the amount of work put into the assessment while not overwhelming readers with information.
We used "just enough" design documentation to align with our engineer. While we regularly communicated with our engineer in stand ups and sprint planning/demos, some amount of documentation proved useful. It gave us a single source of truth as decisions were made throughout the design phase and into the engineering phase.
The product was launched with a test group of consultants in Q1 of 2024. Initial feedback has been positive, and users are excited about use cases including scaling companies and preparing for acquisitions.
We are currently planning for the next phase of the product, weighing options for a customer login or an AI recommendations assistant. Once the Growth Pros have had their hands on the tool for a few months, I hypothesize a Kano analysis would be an effective tool in gathering more info on their needs and desires.