Diego Santos - Designer

HOCKEYSTICK
network

Product design

strategy

user research

user testing

responsive design

metric analysis

My role for this project was to lead the entire design process, including user research, user interviews, personas creation and validation, interface design and prototyping and user testing, leading and mentoring junior designers during the entire process.

Also, I coordinated all the design deliveries with PMs and the development team during the implementation and worked hands-on with PMs with metric analysis and KPI definitions.

I spearheaded the design effort for this project, taking full responsibility for the entire design lifecycle. This included conducting user research, facilitating user interviews, developing and validating personas, creating the interface design and prototypes, and conducting user testing.

I provided leadership and mentorship to junior designers, and I worked in close partnership with product managers and developers to ensure seamless design integration. My responsibilities also extended to collaborating with PMs on metric analysis and defining key performance indicators.

The challenge

Based on the metrics and the successful KPIs on the Hockeystick Matchmaking we decided to increase the scope of the product, offering new features and a completely new set of internal tools for our team of advisors. This allowed the company to move faster and laser-focused, creating even more funding opportunities for companies.

We also introduced a new business model, based on monthly subscription plans.

USER CENTRIC DESIGN

After a massive round of interviews, with both startups and funders, we decided to create a whole new experience, connecting the users with the advisory team.

The entire communication between the parts was happening using emails, this was a big hassle and provided much room for mistakes and lost deadlines.

So we came up with 3 new features:

A completely new homepage for startups, with a deal status view and task management, and a full messaging application to remove emails from the equation;
A search interface so the users could browse for funders based on their own criteria, the AI was still there and we used it for sorting the results based on the compatibility score. This search was also offering the users the chance to view a full profile for each funder.
The Advisor Deal Management application, an internal tool for our team to be more productive in conducting the deals, assigning tasks and sending messages to the users.