Connecting Change Makers
in Alternative Finance
Connecting Change Makers
in Alternative Finance
Connecting Change Makers
in Alternative Finance
ROLE
Lead
TEAM
Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), Melissa (UX Engineer)
TIMELINE
8 months
STAKEHOLDERS
CEO & CTO at Context 365
TOOLS
Figma, Figjam, Maze, Notion, Segment, LaunchDarkly, Smartlook, Mixpanel,
PLATFORM
Responsive React web-application, iOS, and Android apps
METHODS
Interviews, user testing, prototypes, analytics
TAGS
finance, product design, product management, saas, design system, design research, strategy
Executive Summary
This case study covers an 8-month period during which I led product, research, and design efforts to revamp Context 365, a database and community that connects investors. Through collaboration and iteration, we redesigned the platform, resulting in a 364% increase in conversions in our north star metric.
Context Summits has been connecting ambitious investment managers with serious allocators through innovative, in-person networking events since 2014.
In late 2019, I joined the team as the first designer and product manager to develop a SaaS platform that would enable conference attendees to connect year-round.
I was part of an ambitious project to redesign the search, analyze, and connect experiences.
Background
Context Summits' in-person events and 1-on-1 meetings consistently received positive feedback. The challenge was to understand why the online meetings within Context 365 didn't receive the same enthusiasm. Our goal was to revamp the platform to encourage deeper engagement and connectivity between users.
The high-level goals were to:
Recreate the magic of in-person events in the online platform
Identify the reasons behind the lack of online meeting scheduling
Redesign the platform to facilitate deeper connections
I led product and design efforts while collaborating with Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), Melissa (UX Engineer), and the broader development team.
My role
I led product and design efforts while collaborating with Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), and the broader development team.
Starting Over: Identifying the Problem
We made the big announcement—Context Summits had officially launched Context 365, a new way to network in the alternative investment space year round. Marketing had led the launch effort and officially unveiled a new way for our conference attendees to meet people year round.
There was only one problem.
While people were logging into the platform, viewing profiles, and analyzing data, they weren’t scheduling meetings—our north star metric.
We had implemented the CEO’s vision: Make our investor database accessible year round and enable our customers to easily schedule online meetings with each other. Now we had to figure out why it wasn’t working, come up with a better solution, and convince the team to build something better.
Research: Digging Deeper
Analyzing the Data
Upon deeper investigation, I discovered some intriguing insights from our analytics:
Our conversion rate was 1.78% (in the last 90 days, almost 5000 meeting requests were sent and 89 meetings were confirmed).
Managers (those raising capital) sent 95% of meeting requests
Manager to allocator conversion rates were extremely low
Allocator to manager conversion rates were extremely high
I conducted interviews with various managers and allocators, focusing on their product usage, successes, pain points, and goals.
I created a research guide, reached out to our customers, scheduled calls, analyzed the findings, and synthesized insights.
Insights
From the research findings, I identified key insights and guiding principles to steer the project and team forward:
Focus on high-quality connection opportunities
When allocators express interest in a fund manager, it's likely that they're considering investing in their fund (high-quality lead; do more of this)
When fund managers send interest to multiple allocators, they often adopt a "spray and pray" approach (low-quality lead; do less of this)
Concentrate on the allocator journey and design around it
Since fund managers pay to access the platform and allocators don't (they pay with attention), design the experience to make it as easy as possible for allocators to discover and express interest in fund managers that meet their investment criteria
Help fund managers tell their stories, not just conduct cold outreach
The platform should allow allocators to "get to know" managers through video content, PDFs, and writings and interviews
Support customers throughout their fund-raising/allocation process
Facilitate capital raising and capital allocation journeys from discovery and analysis to management and allocation
In addition to refocusing the team vision, the design team created research-based persona archetypes to align the broader team around a shared understanding of the “Who” behind our business--something the company never did before.
With these focuses in hand and a better understanding of our ideal customers—their behaviors, aspirations, goals, and pain points—I hosted a remote workshop to collaborate with the broader team with a goal of narrowing down a set of features to test, build, and measure.
Opportunities
We identified and prioritized various opportunities based on customer value, effort, and business value:
Update the main action of “requesting a meeting” to something less pressure-filled such as “indicate interest” → reduce pressure of taking meetings. New feature: Indicate interest call to action
Build campaigns as way for users to manage their capital raise/allocation and receive indications of interest → manage and track an activity pipeline. New feature: Campaigns (fund-raising and allocation projects where activity is categorized and easy to manage)
Build interest screeners so allocators can get better understand fund strategy and manager profiles before meeting → increase lead quality. New feature: Interest screeners
4. Build content distribution systems so members can learn about each other and their investment goals → increase understanding between platform members. New feature: Content & community
Test, Build, & Measure
We tailored our testing approach for each feature based on its risk level (for instance, rolling out campaigns involved significant development work)
Since we had already developed a fully functional and accessible design system in Figma, we used LaunchDarkly to quickly release and test the low-risk features.
For campaigns—the largest scope of work—we started with low-fidelity wireframes in Figma, shared them in customer interviews, incorporated feedback, and then tested the flows using remote-unmoderated testing with Maze.
Results
After monitoring the primary changes to the:
main call to action from “send meeting request” to “indicate interest” and
implementation of campaigns
We observed an increase in indications of interest (connecting investors) from 1.78% → 8.26%, a 364% increase.
Interestingly, we managed to shift the experience to be allocator-driven and saw more allocators indicating interest in funds than vice versa!
This was a tremendously fun experience and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such a great group of team members and clients.
jake
Let's collaborate.
jacobrogelberg [at] gmail.com
you
jake
Let's collaborate.
jacobrogelberg [at] gmail.com
you
jake
Let's collaborate.
jacobrogelberg [at] gmail.com
you
ROLE
Lead
TEAM
Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), Melissa (UX Engineer)
TIMELINE
8 months
STAKEHOLDERS
CEO & CTO at Context 365
TOOLS
Figma, Figjam, Maze, Notion, Segment, LaunchDarkly, Smartlook, Mixpanel,
PLATFORM
Responsive React web-application, iOS, and Android apps
METHODS
Interviews, user testing, prototypes, analytics
TAGS
finance, product design, product management, saas, design system, design research, strategy
Executive Summary
This case study covers an 8-month period during which I led product, research, and design efforts to revamp Context 365, a database and community that connects investors. Through collaboration and iteration, we redesigned the platform, resulting in a 364% increase in conversions in our north star metric.
Context Summits has been connecting ambitious investment managers with serious allocators through innovative, in-person networking events since 2014.
In late 2019, I joined the team as the first designer and product manager to develop a SaaS platform that would enable conference attendees to connect year-round.
I was part of an ambitious project to redesign the search, analyze, and connect experiences.
Background
Context Summits' in-person events and 1-on-1 meetings consistently received positive feedback. The challenge was to understand why the online meetings within Context 365 didn't receive the same enthusiasm. Our goal was to revamp the platform to encourage deeper engagement and connectivity between users.
The high-level goals were to:
Recreate the magic of in-person events in the online platform
Identify the reasons behind the lack of online meeting scheduling
Redesign the platform to facilitate deeper connections
I led product and design efforts while collaborating with Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), Melissa (UX Engineer), and the broader development team.
My role
I led product and design efforts while collaborating with Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), and the broader development team.
Starting Over: Identifying the Problem
We made the big announcement—Context Summits had officially launched Context 365, a new way to network in the alternative investment space year round. Marketing had led the launch effort and officially unveiled a new way for our conference attendees to meet people year round.
There was only one problem.
While people were logging into the platform, viewing profiles, and analyzing data, they weren’t scheduling meetings—our north star metric.
We had implemented the CEO’s vision: Make our investor database accessible year round and enable our customers to easily schedule online meetings with each other. Now we had to figure out why it wasn’t working, come up with a better solution, and convince the team to build something better.
Research: Digging Deeper
Analyzing the Data
Upon deeper investigation, I discovered some intriguing insights from our analytics:
Our conversion rate was 1.78% (in the last 90 days, almost 5000 meeting requests were sent and 89 meetings were confirmed).
Managers (those raising capital) sent 95% of meeting requests
Manager to allocator conversion rates were extremely low
Allocator to manager conversion rates were extremely high
I conducted interviews with various managers and allocators, focusing on their product usage, successes, pain points, and goals.
I created a research guide, reached out to our customers, scheduled calls, analyzed the findings, and synthesized insights.
Insights
From the research findings, I identified key insights and guiding principles to steer the project and team forward:
Focus on high-quality connection opportunities
When allocators express interest in a fund manager, it's likely that they're considering investing in their fund (high-quality lead; do more of this)
When fund managers send interest to multiple allocators, they often adopt a "spray and pray" approach (low-quality lead; do less of this)
Concentrate on the allocator journey and design around it
Since fund managers pay to access the platform and allocators don't (they pay with attention), design the experience to make it as easy as possible for allocators to discover and express interest in fund managers that meet their investment criteria
Help fund managers tell their stories, not just conduct cold outreach
The platform should allow allocators to "get to know" managers through video content, PDFs, and writings and interviews
Support customers throughout their fund-raising/allocation process
Facilitate capital raising and capital allocation journeys from discovery and analysis to management and allocation
In addition to refocusing the team vision, the design team created research-based persona archetypes to align the broader team around a shared understanding of the “Who” behind our business--something the company never did before.
With these focuses in hand and a better understanding of our ideal customers—their behaviors, aspirations, goals, and pain points—I hosted a remote workshop to collaborate with the broader team with a goal of narrowing down a set of features to test, build, and measure.
Opportunities
We identified and prioritized various opportunities based on customer value, effort, and business value:
Update the main action of “requesting a meeting” to something less pressure-filled such as “indicate interest” → reduce pressure of taking meetings. New feature: Indicate interest call to action
Build campaigns as way for users to manage their capital raise/allocation and receive indications of interest → manage and track an activity pipeline. New feature: Campaigns (fund-raising and allocation projects where activity is categorized and easy to manage)
Build interest screeners so allocators can get better understand fund strategy and manager profiles before meeting → increase lead quality. New feature: Interest screeners
4. Build content distribution systems so members can learn about each other and their investment goals → increase understanding between platform members. New feature: Content & community
Test, Build, & Measure
We tailored our testing approach for each feature based on its risk level (for instance, rolling out campaigns involved significant development work)
Since we had already developed a fully functional and accessible design system in Figma, we used LaunchDarkly to quickly release and test the low-risk features.
For campaigns—the largest scope of work—we started with low-fidelity wireframes in Figma, shared them in customer interviews, incorporated feedback, and then tested the flows using remote-unmoderated testing with Maze.
Results
After monitoring the primary changes to the:
main call to action from “send meeting request” to “indicate interest” and
implementation of campaigns
We observed an increase in indications of interest (connecting investors) from 1.78% → 8.26%, a 364% increase.
Interestingly, we managed to shift the experience to be allocator-driven and saw more allocators indicating interest in funds than vice versa!
This was a tremendously fun experience and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such a great group of team members and clients.
ROLE
Lead
TEAM
Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), Melissa (UX Engineer)
TIMELINE
8 months
STAKEHOLDERS
CEO & CTO at Context 365
TOOLS
Figma, Figjam, Maze, Notion, Segment, LaunchDarkly, Smartlook, Mixpanel,
PLATFORM
Responsive React web-application, iOS, and Android apps
METHODS
Interviews, user testing, prototypes, analytics
TAGS
finance, product design, product management, saas, design system, design research, strategy
Executive Summary
This case study covers an 8-month period during which I led product, research, and design efforts to revamp Context 365, a database and community that connects investors. Through collaboration and iteration, we redesigned the platform, resulting in a 364% increase in conversions in our north star metric.
Context Summits has been connecting ambitious investment managers with serious allocators through innovative, in-person networking events since 2014.
In late 2019, I joined the team as the first designer and product manager to develop a SaaS platform that would enable conference attendees to connect year-round.
I was part of an ambitious project to redesign the search, analyze, and connect experiences.
Background
Context Summits' in-person events and 1-on-1 meetings consistently received positive feedback. The challenge was to understand why the online meetings within Context 365 didn't receive the same enthusiasm. Our goal was to revamp the platform to encourage deeper engagement and connectivity between users.
The high-level goals were to:
Recreate the magic of in-person events in the online platform
Identify the reasons behind the lack of online meeting scheduling
Redesign the platform to facilitate deeper connections
I led product and design efforts while collaborating with Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), Melissa (UX Engineer), and the broader development team.
My role
I led product and design efforts while collaborating with Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), and the broader development team.
Starting Over: Identifying the Problem
We made the big announcement—Context Summits had officially launched Context 365, a new way to network in the alternative investment space year round. Marketing had led the launch effort and officially unveiled a new way for our conference attendees to meet people year round.
There was only one problem.
While people were logging into the platform, viewing profiles, and analyzing data, they weren’t scheduling meetings—our north star metric.
We had implemented the CEO’s vision: Make our investor database accessible year round and enable our customers to easily schedule online meetings with each other. Now we had to figure out why it wasn’t working, come up with a better solution, and convince the team to build something better.
Research: Digging Deeper
Analyzing the Data
Upon deeper investigation, I discovered some intriguing insights from our analytics:
Our conversion rate was 1.78% (in the last 90 days, almost 5000 meeting requests were sent and 89 meetings were confirmed).
Managers (those raising capital) sent 95% of meeting requests
Manager to allocator conversion rates were extremely low
Allocator to manager conversion rates were extremely high
I conducted interviews with various managers and allocators, focusing on their product usage, successes, pain points, and goals.
I created a research guide, reached out to our customers, scheduled calls, analyzed the findings, and synthesized insights.
Insights
From the research findings, I identified key insights and guiding principles to steer the project and team forward:
Focus on high-quality connection opportunities
When allocators express interest in a fund manager, it's likely that they're considering investing in their fund (high-quality lead; do more of this)
When fund managers send interest to multiple allocators, they often adopt a "spray and pray" approach (low-quality lead; do less of this)
Concentrate on the allocator journey and design around it
Since fund managers pay to access the platform and allocators don't (they pay with attention), design the experience to make it as easy as possible for allocators to discover and express interest in fund managers that meet their investment criteria
Help fund managers tell their stories, not just conduct cold outreach
The platform should allow allocators to "get to know" managers through video content, PDFs, and writings and interviews
Support customers throughout their fund-raising/allocation process
Facilitate capital raising and capital allocation journeys from discovery and analysis to management and allocation
In addition to refocusing the team vision, the design team created research-based persona archetypes to align the broader team around a shared understanding of the “Who” behind our business--something the company never did before.
With these focuses in hand and a better understanding of our ideal customers—their behaviors, aspirations, goals, and pain points—I hosted a remote workshop to collaborate with the broader team with a goal of narrowing down a set of features to test, build, and measure.
Opportunities
We identified and prioritized various opportunities based on customer value, effort, and business value:
Update the main action of “requesting a meeting” to something less pressure-filled such as “indicate interest” → reduce pressure of taking meetings. New feature: Indicate interest call to action
Build campaigns as way for users to manage their capital raise/allocation and receive indications of interest → manage and track an activity pipeline. New feature: Campaigns (fund-raising and allocation projects where activity is categorized and easy to manage)
Build interest screeners so allocators can get better understand fund strategy and manager profiles before meeting → increase lead quality. New feature: Interest screeners
4. Build content distribution systems so members can learn about each other and their investment goals → increase understanding between platform members. New feature: Content & community
Test, Build, & Measure
We tailored our testing approach for each feature based on its risk level (for instance, rolling out campaigns involved significant development work)
Since we had already developed a fully functional and accessible design system in Figma, we used LaunchDarkly to quickly release and test the low-risk features.
For campaigns—the largest scope of work—we started with low-fidelity wireframes in Figma, shared them in customer interviews, incorporated feedback, and then tested the flows using remote-unmoderated testing with Maze.
Results
After monitoring the primary changes to the:
main call to action from “send meeting request” to “indicate interest” and
implementation of campaigns
We observed an increase in indications of interest (connecting investors) from 1.78% → 8.26%, a 364% increase.
Interestingly, we managed to shift the experience to be allocator-driven and saw more allocators indicating interest in funds than vice versa!
This was a tremendously fun experience and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such a great group of team members and clients.
jake
Let's collaborate.
jacobrogelberg [at] gmail.com
you
jake
Let's collaborate.
jacobrogelberg [at] gmail.com
you
ROLE
Lead
TEAM
Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), Melissa (UX Engineer)
TIMELINE
8 months
STAKEHOLDERS
CEO & CTO at Context 365
TOOLS
Figma, Figjam, Maze, Notion, Segment, LaunchDarkly, Smartlook, Mixpanel,
PLATFORM
Responsive React web-application, iOS, and Android apps
METHODS
Interviews, user testing, prototypes, analytics
TAGS
finance, product design, product management, saas, design system, design research, strategy
Executive Summary
This case study covers an 8-month period during which I led product, research, and design efforts to revamp Context 365, a database and community that connects investors. Through collaboration and iteration, we redesigned the platform, resulting in a 364% increase in conversions in our north star metric.
Context Summits has been connecting ambitious investment managers with serious allocators through innovative, in-person networking events since 2014.
In late 2019, I joined the team as the first designer and product manager to develop a SaaS platform that would enable conference attendees to connect year-round.
I was part of an ambitious project to redesign the search, analyze, and connect experiences.
Background
Context Summits' in-person events and 1-on-1 meetings consistently received positive feedback. The challenge was to understand why the online meetings within Context 365 didn't receive the same enthusiasm. Our goal was to revamp the platform to encourage deeper engagement and connectivity between users.
The high-level goals were to:
Recreate the magic of in-person events in the online platform
Identify the reasons behind the lack of online meeting scheduling
Redesign the platform to facilitate deeper connections
I led product and design efforts while collaborating with Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), Melissa (UX Engineer), and the broader development team.
My role
I led product and design efforts while collaborating with Carlos (Design Research Lead), Luke (Lead Product Designer), and the broader development team.
Starting Over: Identifying the Problem
We made the big announcement—Context Summits had officially launched Context 365, a new way to network in the alternative investment space year round. Marketing had led the launch effort and officially unveiled a new way for our conference attendees to meet people year round.
There was only one problem.
While people were logging into the platform, viewing profiles, and analyzing data, they weren’t scheduling meetings—our north star metric.
We had implemented the CEO’s vision: Make our investor database accessible year round and enable our customers to easily schedule online meetings with each other. Now we had to figure out why it wasn’t working, come up with a better solution, and convince the team to build something better.
Research: Digging Deeper
Analyzing the Data
Upon deeper investigation, I discovered some intriguing insights from our analytics:
Our conversion rate was 1.78% (in the last 90 days, almost 5000 meeting requests were sent and 89 meetings were confirmed).
Managers (those raising capital) sent 95% of meeting requests
Manager to allocator conversion rates were extremely low
Allocator to manager conversion rates were extremely high
I conducted interviews with various managers and allocators, focusing on their product usage, successes, pain points, and goals.
I created a research guide, reached out to our customers, scheduled calls, analyzed the findings, and synthesized insights.
Insights
From the research findings, I identified key insights and guiding principles to steer the project and team forward:
Focus on high-quality connection opportunities
When allocators express interest in a fund manager, it's likely that they're considering investing in their fund (high-quality lead; do more of this)
When fund managers send interest to multiple allocators, they often adopt a "spray and pray" approach (low-quality lead; do less of this)
Concentrate on the allocator journey and design around it
Since fund managers pay to access the platform and allocators don't (they pay with attention), design the experience to make it as easy as possible for allocators to discover and express interest in fund managers that meet their investment criteria
Help fund managers tell their stories, not just conduct cold outreach
The platform should allow allocators to "get to know" managers through video content, PDFs, and writings and interviews
Support customers throughout their fund-raising/allocation process
Facilitate capital raising and capital allocation journeys from discovery and analysis to management and allocation
In addition to refocusing the team vision, the design team created research-based persona archetypes to align the broader team around a shared understanding of the “Who” behind our business--something the company never did before.
With these focuses in hand and a better understanding of our ideal customers—their behaviors, aspirations, goals, and pain points—I hosted a remote workshop to collaborate with the broader team with a goal of narrowing down a set of features to test, build, and measure.
Opportunities
We identified and prioritized various opportunities based on customer value, effort, and business value:
Update the main action of “requesting a meeting” to something less pressure-filled such as “indicate interest” → reduce pressure of taking meetings. New feature: Indicate interest call to action
Build campaigns as way for users to manage their capital raise/allocation and receive indications of interest → manage and track an activity pipeline. New feature: Campaigns (fund-raising and allocation projects where activity is categorized and easy to manage)
Build interest screeners so allocators can get better understand fund strategy and manager profiles before meeting → increase lead quality. New feature: Interest screeners
Build content distribution systems so members can learn about each other and their investment goals → increase understanding between platform members. New feature: Content & community
Test, Build, & Measure
We tailored our testing approach for each feature based on its risk level (for instance, rolling out campaigns involved significant development work).
Since we had already developed a fully functional and accessible design system in Figma, we used LaunchDarkly to quickly release and test the low-risk features.
For campaigns—the largest scope of work—we started with low-fidelity wireframes in Figma, shared them in customer interviews, incorporated feedback, and then tested the flows using remote-unmoderated testing with Maze.
Results
After monitoring the primary changes to the:
main call to action from “send meeting request” to “indicate interest” and
implementation of campaigns
We observed an increase in indications of interest (connecting investors) from 1.78% → 8.26%, a 364% increase.
Interestingly, we managed to shift the experience to be allocator-driven and saw more allocators indicating interest in funds than vice versa!
This was a tremendously fun experience and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such a great group of team members and clients.
jake
Let's collaborate.
jacobrogelberg [at] gmail.com
you