PitchBook

OVERVIEW

PitchBook is a financial research and analytics software company. They provide trending, forecasting and modeling information on the private and public equity ecosystem.
My role at PitchBook was focused on four areas.

KEY OBJECTIVES:

Change clients' perception of product & grow customer segment
Deepen the understanding of our customer base across all UX and Product
Build a supportive, collaborative and innovative team that leads change throughout our company.
Improve and create operational standards and processes for the product org made up of UX, product management, development and data science

Change Client Perception of the Product & Grow Customer Segment

PitchBook (PB) was perceived as a reference tool by the fintech industry. As part of PB’s growth strategy, the company wanted to increase their venture capital (VC) and corporate strategy segments by 15%. What follows is the process of how we successfully repositioned the product through strategic roadmap initiatives, met our sales targets and feature KPIs, launched Emerging Spaces and evolved as a design and product organization along the way.

PART 1 - BUSINESS STRATEGY

RESEARCH, DEFINING TARGETS & ALIGNMENT

RESEARCH

As a product org we already knew a lot about our venture capital users and their ecosystem. In the previous quarter the UX team conducted extensive research, finding and analyzing trends in VC support calls and ichats. We listened to recorded sales calls with VC clients to understand what resonated with them and what did not and reviewed custom reports prepared for venture capital clients. We met with key subject matter experts within the company to get their perspective. When we exhausted our internal resources, the team then conducted interviews with existing venture capitalists to fill in remaining gaps and validate our findings. From this research, we created detailed journey maps, personas, and worked with our product trainer to develop training content used for new hires.

With this foundation in place, we focused our research on competitors as the starting point for this initiative. While the product manager analyzed competitors’ product capabilities and positioning, the UX team provided a UI analysis of those same competitors. Using all of this information, the heads of the product org (PM, myself as head of UX and AI/Machine Learning) brainstormed potential quick-win enhancements to the product as well as longer more impactful features. The Director of Product then refined and prioritized the list to initiate roadmap discussions with. This top down approach to roadmap creation was a legacy process that later evolved to empower more of the product teams ownership.

DEFINING TARGETS

Next, we met with the head of sales and customer success to informally discuss targets for sales and retention rates. We aligned on where we would like to be and what we would need in order to achieve those goals. I then provided rough story points and duration for each potential feature. I did this on my own as this was a new concept for the teams, and we were still growing that skill.

EXECUTIVE ALIGNMENT

At PitchBook executive leadership was very involved in the roadmapping process. During a day-long session we (the heads of product) met with the executive leadership team to review proposed business goals and what was needed to reach those goals. We then reviewed all potential features, their cost and projected impact. Each member had 100 points to “spend” on the features they felt would help the company reach our goals. After this process was completed, PM reconciled the differences and revised the roadmap. From this, I created a UX resource plan which highlighted the work we could complete with current staff numbers. We reviewed the list of “unresourced features” one by one. We asked ourselves: “Is this feature critical?” and if yes, “Do we need to ask for more resources?” If the answer was no, we then asked: “Can this feature be pushed back a quarter or moved to the backlog?” The outcome of this process became the guideline for our VC roadmap.

COMPANY ALIGNMENT

When speaking with clients, sales and customer success members often referred to the PitchBook platform as a reference tool. How could we expect the industry to think of us as a source for deep insights if we did not see ourselves that way first? So we devised a plan. In our next company wide meeting, myself and my product peer delivered the vision for the future of PitchBook. The message was reinforced in bi-weekly meetings with sales and customer success. Prior to the launch of Emerging Spaces, the VP of Sales and Director of Customer Success had a much publicized cold call competition focused on VC clients. There was a lot of excitement generated by this, and reps listened repeatedly to the way these two dynamic leaders positioned our products with potential VC clients. By the time we launched Emerging Space, the company was thinking and speaking about our platform differently.

PART 2- EVOLVING DESIGN APPROACH

OLD APPROACH FAILS, OPPORTUNITY FOR GROWTH

Emerging Spaces was the first “high impact” feature scheduled for release on our VC roadmap.That meant it was our first real opportunity to alter the perception of our product and make a big splash with users. Happily, that is just what happened! Post launch, the feedback and engagement from customers was beyond what any of us had projected. After using the feature, one of our most vocally critical clients exclaimed, "Congratulations, you just upped the entire market's game."

Though the feature success felt great, getting to that point did not. This was one of the most painful features the team ever worked on. Through this project, our practices as a product team were challenged, and we were forced to grow and evolved not just the product but our discipline and selves as well.

OLD APPROACH FAILS

With the roadmap timeline in mind, the team defined the feature around what could be released using the infrastructure and data available. This was an approach the product manager leading the feature had used to great success in the past, however, it was not the right approach for this feature. We needed to go beyond the constraints of the current product and do something truly innovative; but old habits are hard to break. The product manager and designer jumped straight into design. They worked in a silo for two weeks and eagerly presented their work in a grand reveal. The feature was akin to an aggregate news feed. It fell flat. It failed to meet any of the design tenants we had set out for the feature in the beginning. The feature was supposed to be: 1) highly interactive, 2) easily provide true valuable analysis of trends without making people work for them and 3) be fun to use.

Convincing the team that the feature as designed wasn’t worth building was challenging. They had shown the mockups to a few customers and received positive feedback. After reviewing their research calls, it was apparent they had phrased the questions with a strong confirmation bias and hadn’t asked the right questions. It took another very difficult review with executives to convince them that they were on the wrong track. The feedback I had given during design review proved to be consistent with the perspective of the CEO and VP of Sales. Realizing that they had to start over, the team felt defeated and worse, they didn’t know how to move forward. The product and design model they followed in the past would not get them to where they needed to go.

OPPORTUNITY FOR GROWTH
From failure arose a great opportunity. The Chief Product Officer had been unwilling to let the team run design sprints or try cross-team collaboration sessions. He felt they were a waste of time. However, I convinced him to let us try something new as the team was at an impasse. I took full responsibility if it failed. These types of sessions had worked well for me at other companies and I had faith in their power and it worked! In our design sprint, It was the first time in the history of the company that the machine learning team sat in the same room as sales and customer success folks. It was truly energizing to see the excitement and quality of ideas generated from the collaboration. The product manager started to see the possibilities of what we could do with data. The connection and support between the teams strengthened.

The team started anew with all these great ideas and a pile of sketches and sticky notes. They worked through several iterations and refinements until they got to a prototype everyone felt good about and then they tested it with customers. It tested well. Only minor refinements were needed.

Even though we made it through this large design hurdle, it still wasn’t smooth sailing, as the feature brought up a lot of “firsts” for the product and machine learning teams. We worked through the problems and came out stronger for the experience. Emerging Spaces was wildly successful. As mentioned, it exceeded the usage and engagement KPIs we’d targeted and kept growing. It became the showpiece used to close VC deals and helped the company meet our quarterly VC growth targets. Emerging Spaces not only changed the product’s position in the market, it transformed us as a product and design org forcing us to grow beyond our old ways and embrace new techniques and collaboration that really drove innovation. We learned a lot as a team and thankfully, the growing pains were well worth it.

Deepening Customer Knowledge with Custom Fund Benchmarking

Fund managers and asset allocators had long been an under supported PitchBook customer segment. The morningstar acquisition of PitchBook provided a much larger data set to better serve this group; and in 2019, this segment became an important part of the PitchBook's growth plan. However, with the exception of one financial analyst, no one in the company had more than a superficial understanding the segment's needs.

Coordinating efforts with our product analyst, product trainer, product management and UX, an in depth training program was developed from talks given by our funds analyst. UX and PM members read industry reports and journals to arm themselves with as much base information as they could, before they began their customer interviews. It became immediately obvious that the way fund information in the platform was presented was NOT the way fund managers used it.

We first cleaned up our product offering to be in line with industry standards and then brought value by creating a custom benchmark tool to easily compare a fund 's performance to relevant peers. This tool allowed for both novice and expert user use-cases.

Research Center

In 2018 morningstar informed PitchBook that they were to take over the m* Equity Research business. This was much to the protest of PitchBook for whom this meant a large platform investment with little payoff.

However, through several envisioning sessions lead by the UX team, a three year vision was created. When the vision was presented to senior leadership, they not only approved the vision, but immediately green lighted funds for an acquisition to help accelerate the plan.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse