Overview
This is one of the main onboarding tools at Carta, a platform that helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity.
Every new Carta company needs to go through an onboarding process. By adding their correct cap table and company data, they are set up for success inside the platform. For Carta to scale, we needed a tool to leverage our Onboarding Managers’ (staff responsible for setting up new accounts) time so they could focus on larger and more complex cap tables.
This self-service onboarding tool, known today as Launch, is designed to be used by early-stage companies and brand new founders that didn’t have knowledge about equity management or money to spend on law firms.
Goal: Fewer humans. Perfect data. Happy users.
I was the sole Product Designer working on the team, usually paired with 2-4 engineers. At the beginning of the project I was also responsible for project management and sprint planning. Later on, with a dedicated product manager on the team, I could focus more on defining solutions, creating prototypes and validating ideas with stakeholders and users.
My design process during this project involved building user personas, phone/video interviews, identifying user problems, doing wireflows, high and low fidelity mock-ups, prototyping and iterating through user testing.
product thinking
Problem
The main Carta onboarding tool, called Setup Guide, was being used by all types of companies, from 2 founders in a garage with very simple cap tables, to massive enterprises with more than 5000 stakeholders and very complex transactions.
It was a very difficult workflow for smaller companies, turning their first experience with the platform frustrating and confusing. The tool was complex, contained terms that users had never heard about, and was too cost prohibitive.
Based on this data we figured that the majority of companies at Carta were in a flow that was too complex and too long for their use case. Also, we were losing a lot of deals.
According to law firms partnered with Carta, 3 out of 4 new companies formed monthly in the US were not considering us as their cap table management platform at the time.
Opportunity
Help smaller, early-stage companies and their law firm partners get onto Carta without requiring human assistance.
solution
Create a self-service onboarding flow that educates new users, accurately collects cap table data, and sets users up for continued success on the platform.
success
- Expand our market capture upstream
- Drive margins down while collecting accurate data
- Improve initial impressions of Carta and hook them into the network
Design thinking
Guidelines
For this project we used Carta’s new design system, _Ink.
I decided — through user testing and early feedback — to invest in contextual support, concise paths and descriptive actions. The crucial items that would make the workflow intuitive and user friendly were support links, field descriptions, having no more than one call-to-action per page and telling the users exactly what will happen if they click on something.
Rationale
1. “The Master Plan”
Flowchart to understand how to distribute the user needs between the traditional Setup Guide workflow and the new self-service.
2. User personas
Starting to define the main user personas of the workflow.
3. User problems
Defining the user problems to better understand their needs during onboarding.
4. Solutions
After have defining the user problems, now thinking about how to solve them in each of the workflow’s pages.
iteration design
One of the hardest problems I came across during the project was having two very different personas using the same workflow:
Founders: newbie early stage CEOs that didn’t understand much about equity management and its terms.
Law firm paralegals: equity experts that were hired to ensure their client’s cap tables were accurate according to the law.
Founders were generally the ones leading the onboarding process, but we highly recommended that their legal counsel should be associated to the account to make sure all data was correct before activation.
For founders, we wanted to have a very linear workflow where they would be guided every step of the way with a lot of context and handholding, but this type of experience wasn’t necessarily ideal for paralegals — It added too much friction to their daily work, since they needed the freedom to complete each task in any order they wanted according to the information they had at the moment.
Figuring out a way to have both types of user happy while going through the same workflow was a challenge, and because of that we decided to separate the user experiences and build a version of the onboarding process just for paralegals, called at the time Launch Setup Guide.
Ideal proposal
Main features: Open workflow, contextual support, support links, segmented content, progress bar, in-app spreadsheet. Check the prototype here.
Results
The tool was launched in November 2018 and has been used to onboard companies that have 10 to 25 stakeholders and common stock only. This tool is also used by small law firms to self-onboard smaller accounts.
After enabling the tool for law firms to self-onboard their clients, the number of onboardings coming from SSO has been growing significantly throughout the months.
Conclusion
Success accomplished
- Expand our market capture upstream:
When we added law firms to test the workflow (and afterwards creating a flow that fit their needs better), we could validate that our main users can and want to use the tool, and are interested in adding more early stage companies that beforehand were not in our pipeline, all of that without Onboarding Managers help.
- Drive margins down while collecting accurate data:
Onboarding Managers are disconnected to SSO companies, having time to focus on bigger, complex and more expensive accounts.
- Improve initial impressions of Carta and hook them into the network:
The UI and UX were improved to make it easy and intuitive to use, increasing NPS during onboarding. Plus, as soon as we got the smaller companies inside the platform through a simple workflow, they were more inclined to stay and grow inside the platform. Around 20% of the companies already upgraded to Growth subscription.
- Time to value:
From 25 days average to onboard a SMB company into the platform, this number dropped to 8.5 days average while using SSO.
What went well
After we hired a PM and started talking to users on a daily-basis, I could work and explore with several diverged solutions that helped me come up with the ideal UX for our users.
What could have been different
During the first iteration of the tool, I would’ve definitely invested more into user research, testing and validation. At that time, Carta was just starting to think holistically about our users and building a user-centric platform. I didn’t have the proper time to do the research and user testing/validation that the project needed before the roadmap get defined, which resulted in a less polished release that could only be revisited 6 months later. Also, our team didn’t have a dedicated Product Manager until 3 months after launch.