Challenge

Financial services and investing company, SEI was developing a new service to help partners build and manage their business operations. They wanted a way to automate tracking of operational tasks and share best practices for their industry. A small pilot program was underway to determine market needs. Using data collected from the pilot, the client identified internal scaling as a key area for success.

My Role

I led the strategic discovery and validation work for this project, partnering with product and operations teams to determine what was worth building before any significant investment was made. I designed and facilitated the workshops that generated and prioritized direction, created the prototypes used for market testing, and synthesized findings into a recommendation presented to senior management for budget and resource approval. The goal wasn't just good design — it was giving the business a defensible, evidence-based path forward.

Workshop

For this project, I used modified activities from The Design Sprint. I had the team generate ideas through diverge-and-converge activities, then qualify the results by voting for the top priorities. As a group, we created a hybrid storyboard/customer journey, then mapped the top solutions to corresponding points on the journey. This helped us see the complete story of how someone might engage with the service.

The workshops led us to create a marketing site to test our messaging and a native app to test our proposed features.

Marketing

I asked each team member to share a lightning demo with the group — first researching existing products for inspiration, then presenting what they found and discussing how we could use similar ideas in our product. Using what we learned, everyone worked on sketches for our marketing site. I distilled the group's contributions to write copy and create a UI, resulting in a site we then presented to testers.

App

To find the most valuable features to test, I had the team write down everything they could think of on Post-it notes and put them on the whiteboard. We organized and voted to find the most important features. The features with the most votes were then judged on an effort vs. impact Kano-style scale and prioritized for testing. The remaining ideas were added to a backlog for later iterations.

Using the highest-impact features, I created an MVP app prototype. This prototype was presented to testers to determine task completion difficulty and overall satisfaction.

Testing

We ran in-person and remote tests. Our script brought users through the journey of discovering the product and using the app. We collected notes and compiled them into a matrix to judge the effectiveness of the product. I compiled the results and delivered recommendations to the team, then iterated on the site and prototype based on what we learned.

Results

Within two months the client had a market-tested direction for their product. When presenting the proposal to senior management, we were able to share both qualitative and quantitative proof that there is a market for the product and a viable solution for the business.