Diligent Corporation
Mar 2022 - Sep 2022
During my time at Diligent I worked on several products that were part of mergers and acquisitions, the latest of which was Diligent Equity, an equity management solution built for venture capital and private equity firms to easily manage their portfolio’s cap tables, legal terms and performance.
Venture Capitalists (VCs) and Private Equity (PE) firms regularly request data from companies (PortCos) that are part of their portfolio. The process of gathering the data is manual, time consuming and prone to costly errors.
I started the project by talking with stakeholders and getting an in-depth understanding of the proposed feature. After reviewing existing user research, I discussed user stories to scope our work and to identify the best way to prioritise design work.
I always try to adhere to the Design Thinking process. Although resources were limited, below is a list of some activities undertaken as part of this project.
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A core design goal was to build a dual interface for those asking for data, VCs/PE Firms, and those providing it, the PortCos.
The VC/PE Firm would need to specify what data they needed, who from, which funding round it was part of and to track the progress of the data being returned.
The PortCo would need to have an overview of what documents are being requested, potentially from multiple VC/PE Firms.
A key requirement from our VC/PE customers was to have flexibility of the data being requested. I designed a flexible form that allowed email templates, mail merge variables and optional file request details.
A huge part of the success of this product was strong communication and collaboration between all team members. I ensured product, business, design and dev teams were using Figma to asynchronously review designs. This helped with regular, time-saving, iterative commenting and updates to designs before they were ready to be reviewed in our meetings. Our team spanned 3 continents so this helped massively with momentum.
Live links to clickable prototypes would also let our designs be checked and reviewed by prospective users. This helped validate design decisions and keep design iterations fast and cheap.