Found's product historically had two main surfaces for sorting and separating funds: business banking and taxes. Through Zendesk tickets and numerous user research programs, we knew this setup didn't support more complex use cases – like managing multiple businesses, customizing direct deposit, saving for specific milestones outside of taxes, or paying vendors.
Users also had no way to keep records of internal transfers between the two surfaces.
Over the course of nearly a year, I worked directly with the cofounders to define the vision of a new suite of features that significantly increased the capability of the banking platform.
Originally kicked off as a relatively straightforward user need to separate balances, the program ended up becoming a powerful combination of financial organization tools as we validated ideas with users on an ongoing basis.
I owned the design process for the entire product lifecycle, leading multiple user research programs and the design of numerous feature milestones.
Found gets business value when users save via larger balances or spend more on their debit cards. Our success metrics (increasing balance per user and increasing spend per user) heavily depended on finding ways for users to easily fund, save, and spend out of their pockets. All milestones were designed with these goals in mind.
The initial ships included a simple update that included the list view to accommodate multiple custom pockets – and include the total balance (instead of just individual balances). In this phase, I monitored Zendesk tickets to get early signals from users about the new UX of the home screen, and if specific transaction logs for Primary and Taxes were creating any confusion. We also tested a variety of potential names for the feature to see what was easiest to understand.
The next releases were more exciting for users. This included rolling out the ability to create custom pockets to organize their income however they choose (particularly popular with fans of the Profit First methodology), setting savings goals for specific life milestones, and setting custom deposit allocations so that when users got paid, the funds are moved automatically to the pockets they select.
Throughout this phase, I tested various design prototypes with users in moderated sessions to validate our initial concepts and get initial feedback before we actually launched this set of features.
These features were geared at increasing both funding and card spend. Adding virtual cards to custom pockets, adding money directly via the custom pocket, and creating specific pocket templates were designed to make it as easy as possible for users to get ramped up in the pocket ecosystem without much confusion – and continue to spend without friction.
At this point in the project, design, product, and engineering were very in sync. We were able to ship core features and make follow-up adjustments based on user feedback quite quickly.
The launch of the Pockets program led to a number of key advances for the business, including an increase of all user balances held, an increased spend per customer, and an increase in gross payment volume.
Today, it's one of Found's most popular features with users, garnering praise for its flexibility, customization, and ease of use – for whatever method of organization best suits their businesses.
By breaking the work into smaller, incremental releases, we were able to learn from each launch without committing too much resourcing before we were confident in the value users were getting. This allowed us to continuously gather feedback from users after nearly every core milestone, and adjust our roadmap priorities as needed based on what we learned.
