Case Study
Turning manual headaches into $1.5M in ARR
Beyond Finance · Lead Product Designer & Technical PM · Q1 2023 · 5 months
The Work
Self-serve enrollment. From concept to production.
The core product screen and the three-step verification flow that powers it.
Enrollment Flow
Can you confirm these are the last 4 digits of your account?
Capital One (•7723)
$10,544.00
Balance as of 01/04/23
Your account number can be found on your:
- • Credit Card
- • Account Statements
- • Online Account
Can you confirm that this account does NOT have any lawsuits, summons, civil or small claims, judgments, or garnishments?
Capital One (•7723)
$10,544.00
Balance as of 01/04/23
Do you want to proceed adding your account with the following change?
Adding this account will update your monthly deposit amount from $350.00 to $372.88.
Capital One (•7723)
$10,544.00
Balance as of 01/04/23
The Payoff
Celebrating the moment that matters most.
After a long enrollment journey, users deserve a reward. Confetti, a clear progress timeline, and immediate next steps turn a transactional confirmation into a moment of delight.
Account Enrolled!
You're one step closer to being debt-free.
Capital One
CAP ONE · (•7723)
$10,544.00
What's Next
Account Enrolled
Creditor Contacted
In Negotiations
Settlement
Next deposit of $400.23 scheduled for Feb 01, 2025
How was your experience?
Design Language
A system built for trust.
Every color, type choice, and component was calibrated to reduce anxiety and signal forward progress.
Color System
Brand
#635BFF
Navy
#0A2540
Success
#0BBF70
Warning
#E2A907
Muted
#8792A2
Type Scale
$34,544
Enrolled Debt
Become debt-free sooner by enrolling your remaining accounts below.
Status System
Component
Capital One (••7723)
$10,544.00
Balance as of 01/04/23
Interactions
Cross-Platform
Mobile and web. Light and dark.
Same flow logic, adapted for each platform's constraints and interaction patterns.
Dark Mode — Mobile
Enrolled Debt
$34,544
Debt Reduction
$17,272
Add Accounts
Enroll Additional Accounts
Become debt-free sooner by enrolling your accounts below!
Synchrony Bank (•1462)
$7,199.00
Chase (•0928)
$5,230.00
Progress
Chase (•3333)
Discover (•4412)
Can you confirm these are the last 4 digits of your account?
Capital One (•7723)
$10,544.00
Balance as of 01/04/23
Your account number can be found on your:
- • Credit Card
- • Account Statements
- • Online Account
Can you confirm that this account does NOT have any lawsuits, summons, civil or small claims, judgments, or garnishments?
Capital One (•7723)
$10,544.00
Balance as of 01/04/23
Do you want to proceed adding your account with the following change?
Adding this account will update your monthly deposit from $350.00 to $372.88.
Capital One (•7723)
$10,544.00
Balance as of 01/04/23
Web — Desktop
Add Accounts
Enroll Additional Accounts
Become debt-free sooner by enrolling your accounts below!
Synchrony Bank (•1462)
$7,199.00
Chase (•0928)
$5,230.00
Progress
Chase (•3333)
Discover (•4412)
Capital One (•2205)
Bank of America (•7891)
Wells Fargo (•5510)
Synchrony Bank (•9901)
Summary
Enrolled Debt
$34,544
Debt Reduction
$17,272
Can you confirm these are the last 4 digits of your account?
Your account number can be found on your credit card, account statements, or online account.
Capital One (•7723)
$10,544.00
Balance as of 01/04/23
Context
$50M in un-enrolled debt hiding behind a phone call.
Beyond Finance is a $100M+ ARR consumer fintech company — debt settlement, 450K+ weekly active users across mobile and web. I was the sole product designer owning both the design function and product strategy for the consumer app.
The problem
“Call an agent.”
Clients wanted to enroll additional debt into their program but the only path was a phone call.
The pain
Dozens of internal teams.
Hold times, manual data entry, and a process so fragile it broke constantly.
The scale
6–7K cases / month
Over phone, web chat, and email.
The bet
If we made this self-serve, clients would enroll more accounts on their own — driving lifetime revenue while cutting ops burden.
Beyond Finance
LTDS by Debt Added Post Enroll
LTDS — Lifetime Debt Settled — is Beyond Finance's measure of per-client value, analogous to LTV. This cohort analysis segments enrolled clients by how (or whether) additional accounts were added post-enrollment: manually by an agent, via bulk match, or not at all. Across every vintage, 40–55% of clients fell into the “No Debt Enrolled Post Enroll” bucket — their LTDS capped at initial enrollment only. That gap, compounded across 6–7K monthly cases, was the quantified opportunity that justified building self-serve.
Research
Every method had a job. Here's why.
I didn't run research to check a box. Each method was chosen to answer a specific question the previous one couldn't.
Map every failure point before touching the design
Interviewed Ops, Client Success, and Engineering to document every step agents handled manually — and everywhere it broke. That map became the flowchart.
Surface emotional friction data can't show
Tested prototypes with real clients. Surfaced three emotional drivers — anxiety (resolve this fast), fear (is this accurate?), stress (don't add more friction). Each became a design pillar.
Define success before you design
Pulled conversion rates for every step in the existing phone flow. Set primary, secondary, and guardrail metrics before a single screen was designed — giving us a go/no-go threshold for each rollout gate.
Discovery
I mapped the entire workflow. The flowchart exploded into hundreds of nodes.
Every API call, every validation step, every error-handling branch. That map surfaced the full scope of complexity clients were navigating through phone agents — and where self-serve could replace it.
Design Pillars
Quick. Accurate. Seamless.
User research surfaced three emotional drivers: anxiety (resolve debt fast), fear (need accurate information), and stress (can 't handle more friction). Every design decision traced back to these pillars.
Lean flow, minimal clicks
Eliminated all non-mandatory questions. Low barrier to entry, high conversion rates.
Data integrity
Worked with Eng & Ops to ensure correct retrieval of account info from credit reports. Feature felt informative and helpful, not gimmicky.
Performance optimization
Anticipated bottlenecks — loading states, technical implementation. Drop-offs were due to factors that couldn't be changed, not the experience.
Iteration
Five versions. Each driven by data and constraints.
Initially designed using our legacy design system — functional, but visually dated. After shipping and validating the core flow, I revisited the UI drawing inspiration from leading fintech platforms like Stripe and Mercury to modernize the visual language.
The call
Wrote the tech spec. Descoped what didn't serve the MVP.
Every POST call, validation rule, and error state — documented alongside the designs. When a status tracker was proposed for V1, we cut it. It added load to an already heavy endpoint and didn't move our core metric. V2 material.
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How I Shipped It
Staged rollout. Metric gates at every step.
Web first to validate guardrails, then a staged A/B rollout on mobile — monitoring metrics at each gate before expanding. We were changing how money moved through the system.
PM Process
I didn't just design this. I owned it.
As both the designer and product manager, I authored the full PRD — defining the problem, sizing the opportunity, setting guardrail metrics, and writing the technical spec engineers shipped from.
Problem Definition
Framed the problem in terms of ops cost, lost revenue, and client experience — before a single screen was designed.
Scope & Hypothesis
Defined MVP scope, primary stakeholders, and the explicit hypothesis we were testing.
Metrics & Thresholds
Set primary, secondary, and guardrail metrics before design began — with go/no-go thresholds at each rollout gate.
Sizing & Measurement Plan
Sized the opportunity across cohorts and built the A/B test plan with required sample sizes and timelines.
Detailed QA Process
A line-by-line QA checklist mapping every technical requirement to expected behavior — ensuring nothing shipped without verification.
Outcomes
Less operational cost. More volume. More revenue.
Additional ARR
Accounts added per month
Additional debt enrolled / mo
Increase in avg debt per tradeline
Completion rate
Click-through rate
Secondary metrics monitored: Attrition, Deposit Adherence, Inbound Calls, Performance Load Time