Design Sprint: Define A New Platform
for the Financial Advisors
How it started
LPL came to Salesforce to help define and create a vision for a new financial advisor platform. It will be a one single place for advisors to conduct market research, portfolio construction and proposal generation. It will help advisors receive proactive insights through a next generation interface.
Why the change? Why us?
Advisors on LPL’s platform find its services to be disjointed across departments, which makes it difficult to navigate and manage data to service their clients. Meanwhile, wholesalers continue to struggle to establish meaningful connections with Advisors.
In the past, LPL’s product team has been working on a few feature based initiatives in-house but struggle to move things fast as they want.
We believe that, with our team’s expertise in design and research, we can pull up a 4 week quick project, including a 3 day design sprint, bring together the stakeholders, and ideate, prototype, and test quickly.
Our approach
Stakeholder interviews to understand their goals, opportunities, obstacles and other ongoing initiatives.
In-depth interviews with their customers, and tested initial ideas.
Designed and facilitated a 3-day design sprint to ideate and decide on prototype to test.
Tested the screens with the financial advisors and revise the recommendations to our client.
My role
Make research plan, conducted research and synthesis, collaborated with client’s design team, designed and facilitated the workshop, fast prototyped screens, tested the design with end users, packaged learnings and recommendations.
Stakeholder interviews
We started the project by talking to 10 key stakeholders to understand their vision, challenges, and expectation of this engagement, etc. We learned that, though the current product is packed with a lot of features and services, they are presented in scattered places so a lot of advisors are not aware of them and still doing them their own way. We also heard from almost all of them that the organization has been really slow to change, for many different reasons—this is exactly why we were brought here!
Advisor interviews
To We conducted 30-60 minutes in-depth interviews with 8 financial advisors to better understand their work process, challenges, and how they engage with wholesalers. We then synthesized our learnings into themes and opportunity areas for further explorations.
As key learnings start to bubble up, we put them into 4 opportunity areas and brought them into the 3 day design sprint workshop to ideate and decide on areas for testing. This is exciting!
Design sprint
We think that design sprint is a great way to bring key stakeholders together, make decisions and prototype and test quickly. We used the “Design Sprint” book by Google Ventures as our guide.
The most exciting part is when we bring our prototypes in front of the advisors to test them out.
The executives in the other room who were watching this were totally blew away by the conversations!
It became a huge success that the client couldn’t wait to do another one for other parts of their customer experience journey!
Design for the MVP
With the feedback on the prototype, we start to map out the MVP product and make it into a more refined format. This is to push the prototype further for future testing. The architecture map shows where we are focus our time on building for an MVP (marked by stars).
