Planning for the future, together
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
UX Researcher
COLLABORATORS
Product Manager
Product Success Manager
Product & Business Operations
Engineers (5)
CHALLENGE
As Playbook's customer base grew, we faced significant challenges with couples during sign-up, in which 45% of folks who indicated they were married had a higher churn rate. From our customer interviews, we discovered that people were looking for a product to help manage finances and plan their future together. Existing products on the market focus mainly on budgeting rather than investing and tax strategy, which are crucial for married couples.
RESEARCH
I combed through over 150+ interviews and conducted 20 additional user interviews with couples & families to understand their perspective on their unique challenges with financial planning. Here are the key takeaways from couples:
SOLUTION
For an MVP, Product, Operations, and Engineering are aligned on a strict feature launch for only married couples filing together, as there’s more complexity with legislation regulation, and extreme sensitivity to tax implications for couples. Here are the key flows that I led the design of this feature launch.
Beta Testing
We began advertising couple planning at the forefront of our product offerings. This led to high adoption of the couple beta feature and an agile testing and iterative
The tradeoff to offering our MVP couple feature is that we only handled a limited demographic of married couples. Product & design made this decision to reduce feature scope creep with engineering bandwidth and tax infrastructure.
Better Tax Strategy for Couples
A spouse can now add their partner’s income & deductibles. This allows Playbook to give an accurate tax strategy plan, specifically, which IRA account is best to invest in. Despite the IRA eligibility complexity, the end-to-end experience of adding a partner’s information is seamless for the user. The drawbacks are that this only handles traditional, 9-5 full-time employed customers. There was no flexibility for other types of employment.
Household Finances in a Single View
Give a full picture of the household finances by bringing separate and joint accounts all together into one view. This also lets couples see how their total net worth grows together over time. This integration allowed everyone to have financial clarity as a unit, not just married couples.
However, only one spouse has complete visibility of their household finances.
IMPACT
The overall feedback from members was very positive, and customers loved the improved couple experience in the product. This feature launch helped scope out the future product strategy, in which I already started design work for handling dual login accounts, financial autonomy, and uncoupling logistics.
Accurate Tax Opportunities
Offer better tax strategies and create an accurate retirement planning experience. Also, avoiding tax implications.
Avoid Tax Penalties
Supporting a spouse’s income & retirement plan helped customers avoid any tax implications and penalties from investing in the wrong IRA accounts.
Early Feature Adoption
A healthy and eager feature adoption from both married and in-relation single customers.