An advisors platform for four business verticals
A workspace for advisors across BTG Pactual’s verticals: configurable dashboard, modular side menu, client page. Four directors could veto — 12 interviews through concept test to one MVP they all signed off on.
Product Design Lead.
Me plus 4 product designers, with tech leads and 4 business directors.
The investment verticals at one of Latin America's largest investment banks.
research · concept design · concept testing · workshop facilitation · prioritisation · team leadership
Note — BTG Pactual
Two and a half years at BTG Pactual, across retail and investments. I was one of the early designers on BTG+, the bank’s consumer app, and shaped its early MVP; BTG+ is now one of the largest businesses in the group. This project sits on the investment side, serving the advisors rather than the end client.
Context for this case and for Modular card insurance, both from that period.
01 — The advisors platform
The project started as a demand from three business directors. Their advisors were giving consistently negative feedback about the existing platform: incomplete, with features scattered across internal and external tools, and it was measurably affecting advisor performance.
I ran Phase 1, research through concept. When the concept was approved I was promoted to Design Lead and built the Phase 2 team: four mid-level designers, each owning a module, with me still designing alongside them.
02 — The problem
Advisors were doing the integration work the software should have done.
I recruited 12 advisors across B2B, B2C and the Advisors vertical and ran semi-structured interviews. Wealth was deliberately left out of the first concept to keep scope honest.
The hypothesis held: advisors manage and communicate with many clients daily on top of their own organisation, and the information they need to make a decision is split across Portal Admin, Excel, Notes, internal Research and Power BI.
03 — Constraints
Four verticals, four directors, one product. Each vertical had a different definition of the MVP, and each director could veto.
No project manager at the start. Definition and prioritisation had no owner, so I took it — which is why the workshops exist.
Board approval gated every step. Weekly design critiques and board meetings meant the concept had to be legible to directors, not just to designers.
04 — Process & key decisions
We split the work into two phases: Concept Design, to prove the direction and win approval, then Detailed Design, to make it buildable. Three product principles carried through both — customizable, multitasking, propositional.
Design 21 concept features, present 9
I ideated across the whole daily workflow — dashboard, widgets, side menu, opportunities, clients, research, goals, bulk investment, bulk message — then cut the board presentation to the nine that carried the argument.
A concept broad enough to test as a real workday, presented tightly enough to approve in one meeting.
Twelve features went unshown, and some resurfaced later as surprises in prioritisation.
A modular dashboard instead of four products
Rather than build a variant per vertical, the dashboard is composed of widgets each office configures. One codebase, four workflows. Tabs and a persistent side menu carried the multitasking principle.
90% acceptance in the concept test, and a way for four directors to say yes to the same thing.
Configurability is expensive to build and easy to get lost in. It pushed complexity onto engineering and onto first-run setup.
Run the prioritisation myself, as two workshops
Workshop 1: feature map and an impact-versus-effort matrix with tech leads, business directors and design leads. Async in between: a table of dependencies and feature sizes from design and engineering, against business and user pain points. Workshop 2: each vertical proposed its MVP, then we merged them into one.
One agreed MVP, with the tradeoffs made in the room rather than relitigated every sprint.
Weeks of my design time spent on product management, at a point where the design also needed me.
Recruit advisors into the design process permanently
My team set up an "Advisors + Design Group": advisors who wanted to join discussions and design workshops. It became a standing recruitment pool and research database for the whole BTG design team.
Bi-weekly usability tests with real advisors, without re-recruiting every round.
A self-selecting group skews enthusiastic. We watched for that and kept recruiting outside it for bigger decisions.
05 — The solution
A configurable dashboard, a modular side menu, and a client page built as a workspace — with the tools an advisor actually reaches for attached to it: call, message, annotation, app view, trading, withdrawal, investment simulator, download, favourites.
The dashboard composes from six widget modules — Metas, Clientes, Produtos, Tickets, Movimentações, Agenda — each office keeping the ones it works from. Reaching that set took around 150 prototypes across the concept phase.
06 — Impact
The concept was approved by the board and moved into Detailed Design with a team of five. Two findings changed the build: the side menu needed text labels, not icons alone, and the client page had too much white space for people used to dense information.
07 — What I learned
Alignment is a design deliverable. The feature map and the dependency table did more for this project than any screen, because until the four directors could see the same tradeoffs, no design was safe to build.
How I split the team mattered more than how I briefed it. I gave each designer a module rather than a vertical, so no one owned a single director’s agenda and every module had to work for all four workflows. It forced them to research across verticals instead of designing for the loudest one, and it made the bi-weekly board reviews a conversation about the product rather than a negotiation between businesses.
Scoring each screen during the concept test — rather than asking for opinions — gave the board a number they trusted, and gave me usability findings I hadn't gone looking for.
08 — What this case doesn't cover
The work here runs from the interviews to board approval and the start of Detailed Design. Four things sit outside it.
Adoption and business outcomes. The 90% and 85% are concept-test acceptance scores, not shipped results. I left BTG before the platform had been live long enough to measure usage, retention or advisor productivity, so any figure would be a guess.
The Wealth vertical. Four verticals shaped the brief, but Wealth was deprioritised for the first MVP. It was never researched or designed for here, and advisors managing large fortunes work differently enough that the modular dashboard may not hold for them.
Module-level design. In Detailed Design I led four product designers, each owning a module. The concept, the structure and the prioritisation are mine; the detailed work inside individual modules is theirs.
What shipped against the spec. Three of the modules were in build when I left. I cannot show which parts survived engineering, or what changed after handover.