One workspace for a bank's investment advisors

Advisors said their platform was incomplete, with features spread across tools. The new one had to serve four verticals: independent offices (B2B), advisors in the bank (B2C), large fortunes (Wealth), and the advisors of an acquired bank. Each director could veto it.

In June 2021 I interviewed 12 advisors in three verticals; Wealth was left out to keep the first concept small. One decision needed five tools: Portal Admin, Excel, Notes, Research and Power BI, joined by hand.

So I designed one modular workspace instead of one per vertical. Each office picks its dashboard widgets: goals, clients, products, tickets, transactions, calendar.

Clients open in tabs and tools sit in a side rail. From the client page, the advisor calls, messages, takes notes, trades, withdraws and runs the investment simulator.

The platform also suggests investments that match each client's profile.

With no product manager at the start, I ran prioritisation: one workshop rated every feature for impact and effort, and a second merged each vertical's first release into one.

I designed 21 features so advisors could test a full workday, and showed the board the nine strongest. The board approved the concept.

Nine advisors in three verticals scored each area for usefulness: 90% acceptance. Two findings changed the design: the side menu needed labels, and the client page was too sparse for people used to dense data.

I was promoted to Design Lead and built a team of four designers, one per module. Every two weeks we showed the work to the four directors. A group of volunteer advisors became the research pool for all of BTG design.

Split the team by module, not by vertical

Each module served all four verticals, so the team learned the whole product.

Ask for scores, not opinions

A score gave the board a number it could trust.

Agreement is design work

Until all four directors saw the same tradeoffs, any one of them could stop it.

• Adoption. The 90% is a concept test score; I left before usage was measured.
• The Wealth vertical. It was never researched here.
• The detailed modules. The four designers I led owned them, and I reviewed their work. This case shows only what I designed.