Maestro
Value Creation Platform for Private Equity
Maestro is a centralized B2B SaaS platform providing a portfolio management ecosystem for Private Equity professionals and executives to facilitate value creation with unmatched clarity and collaboration.
In my 2 years at the company, I holistically re-architected the product while sustainably growing the design organization.
How can we redesign the core data model to be more intuitive for the wide variety of users?
The platform's data structure was confusing, making it tough for users to see the benefits of new features. Despite having a solid beta platform with many appealing features, users lacked a clear holistic understanding of their portfolio companies' progress on key performance indicators, objectives, initiatives, and overall value creation.
Company
Maestro (Accordion Partners)
My Role
UX Product Design Lead
User Research
Concept Development
Prototyping and User Testing
Fix the core platform data structure and wireframe ideas.
After joining the company and listening to both stakeholders’ and users’ frustrations with mental models presented with the current state of the product, I engaged with product and engineering leadership to co-host a product/engineering/customer success off-site workshop to take a step back from the day-to-day work and instead rethink the entire data structure holistically.
It was a few days of absolutely incredible product restructuring, innovation, team-bonding, and long-lasting memories that inspired us all to keep pushing the product forward.
Pictured below from left-to-right is the head of product, head of engineering, myself in the blue-shirt, and a senior customer success lead at our off-site airbnb workspace.
By the end of our off-site, we concluded a model of Goals -> Strategies -> Objectives -> Initiatives -> Tasks, aiming to simplify and streamline the users’ mental models.
Redesigned Core Platform Pages
After deciding on our new and refreshed core data structure, it was time to build and execute our vision from the ground up. We began by redesigning each of the core pages for users to build and manage their Objectives, Initiatives, and Tasks. Taking inspiration from other project management platforms, I redesigned each page to maximize efficiency and visibility, while also ensuring that each Objective that groups these initiatives and tasks together could be easily interpreted for high level project tracking and metrics.
New Holistic Preconfigured Dashboards
Once we completed the data restructuring and redesign of lower-level data component views, we were able to tackle the higher-level value creation project management metrics, like KPI and Equity Growth tracking.
We also segregated the platform experience into two separate experiences - one targeted holistically for investment stakeholders like General/Limited Partners and Investment professionals, and another targeted tactically for portfolio company executives to track and complete tasks while keeping Private Equity partners informed.
Custom Dashboards
After tackling the redesign of all data components and creating separate experiences for investment professionals and for portfolio company executives, we were then able to build highly-requested quality of life features like custom dashboards, allowing users to create their own dashboards to suit their individual needs, in addition to the set of pre-configured dashboards we provided to them to get started more quickly.
Marketing and Visual Design
After continued success conceptualizing and implementing the product overhaul, I was given headcount to hire another UX/UI Product Designer to not only grow the product design capabilities of the team, but also to refresh our visual design and even deliver on some much-needed marketing design enhancement. Below are some screenshots of my team’s visual and marketing design concepts.
