Concept to Product in 4 Months

Company
RiskOptics

Role
Lead Product Designer

Collaborated with

  • Product Leadership

  • Product Design Team

  • Lead Backend Architect

  • Front End Engineers

Context

RiskOptics was seeking to transition their focus from compliance and audit services to the emerging field of risk management. This shift aimed to empower users in actively monitoring, controlling, and reducing risks, going beyond basic security mandates. Being new to both the team and the risk sector, I needed to swiftly grasp the product space, work with the team to transform concepts into functional software, and facilitate the company's transition.

Problems

  • How might we deliver the best experience for an emerging product space?

  • How might we shift user thinking from reactive to proactive with risk management?

  • How do we bridge the gap between risk (new product space) and compliance and audit (current product space)?

Internal research and collaboration

Approach

Interviewed team and leadership to learn product space

Leveraged past user research, internal industry expertise to gain a comprehensive understanding of user and business needs.

User background from product design leadership

Designed experience vision to communicate direction

  • Used past research, industry analyst feedback and our internal subject matter expert’s knowledge to inform designs.

  • Worked directly with leadership to better understand business goals for the product vision.

  • Led the product design team in creating a prototype in Figma to communicate product direction and desired outcomes to the company for the next year.

  • Empowered Sales to use the prototype as part of a demo, which resulted in near 90% success rate for demos at major industry conference.

  • Enabled development to move quickly and build towards vision.

Experience vision prototype

Continued to iterate based on user research

  • Conducted interviews and usability tests with customers

  • Analyzed prospect feedback from sales demos featuring the vision prototype

  • Synthesized data into findings to drive UX improvements and development

Research planning

Updated designs based on research

Identified key themes going forward

Based on user research, we learned going forward we need to…

  • Make risk more actionable

  • Focus more on bare bones/simplifying

  • Use more approachable, simple language

Problems to solve and themes going forward

Takeaways

  • With a clear vision, rapid research-driven iterations, and effective cross-functional collaboration, we achieved concept-to-code in just 4 months.

  • Although we executed swiftly, we were overly ambitious in what users could do with risk, as a fairly new product space.

  • Looking back, I would have pushed harder to move in smaller increments and test more frequently while our other teams focused on implementing table stakes features.

  • In spite of that, through research and feedback, I was still able to refine core user needs, fostering ongoing improvements for a better experience.