Aware of the growing divide between established VC offices and younger, tech-savvy investors, the Mighty team reached out to EchoUser to evolve their home-grown VC investment management tool into a fully formed product that would meet the needs of the industry at large. In a three month timeframe, we conducted a full user-centered design process to drive the creation of a new product that embraced its VC roots while also looking ahead to support the needs of new users.
A successful product starts with an aligned team
As we dug into the team’s vision for this new product, we realized that fully aligning all of the stakeholders' individual visions would be critical. As such, we opened the project with a guiding principles workshop to get all stakeholders’ aspirations, goals, and concerns out in the open. We then translated the vision that came out of that workshop into a set of concrete guiding principles that would guide our activities going forward.
New features to entice new users, but outstanding portfolio management for all
With a clear set of guiding principles, we conducted an extensive contextual inquiry study to learn about VC users. Observing and interviewing dozens of VCs revealed two main findings: 1) a need to design new product functionality for specific user groups; and, 2) a common need across all user groups to streamline their portfolio management experience.
Iterating the design into a final product
Together with the Mighty team, we modeled a new vision for the product, starting with a conceptual framework and iterating through increasingly higher fidelity wireframes. We created a prototype of the new vision and a testing protocol to validate it. After two rounds of usability testing, we had confirmation of the revised information architecture and feature set, a product roadmap for Mighty’s development team, and a list of beta testers eager for access to this revolutionary new tool they had just seen.
Impact
EchoUser delivered production-ready designs for short, medium, and long-term product timelines, effectively realizing the Mighty vision to create an end-to-end VC workflow platform that seamlessly brought together investment & dealflow management
