Stash - Retirement MVP

About Stash
Stash set out with a pie in the sky mission: make investing simple and accessible. By providing low-income demographics access to become investors, Stash is empowering a new sector of people to learn by doing. Stash wanted to scale the business and offer a new type of product to their customers: Retirement accounts.My role
I led the MVP design for Stash’s second product offering, RetirementTeam
- Product Design (me)
- Product
- Android Engineer
- Backend Engineer
- Retirement SME
Responsibilities
Lead design end to end (Problem Definition, Research Synthesis, Low-Fi & Hi-Fi design, handoff to development)
Platform
Android
Timeline
3 months
Research
Stash wanted to understand if they’re user base was prime for a new account type, Retirement, based on their financial lifecycles. A survey was sent out to their audience to guage their level of understanding of different types of retirement accountsBusiness Case
Customers are interested in saving for their retirement, but don’t know what type of retirement account is right for them and don’t know how much money they need to get started. Stash wants to offer their existing customers the education and guidance to choose save for retirement the right way, the Stash way, by saving little bits at the timeKey Themes from Customer Survey
Stash surveyed their customer base to understand customer needs for a retirement account. Here’s what we found:
- 60% of users expressed interest in retirement but don’t know how or where to start, have trouble making a choice
- Only 10% of users were saving for their retirement
- 35% did not know the benefits of a retirement account, and when asked, could not properly describe the difference between a 401K, Roth IRA, or Traditional account
User goal
How might we design a simple retirement product experience that incorporates the core principles of Stash (guidance, education, support) and helps empowers customers to choose the retirement solution that is appropriate for them, and helps them save little bits at a time?Business Goal
- Design and build an easy to use product MVP in 3 months
- Successfully onboard 5% of the population onto the new Stash Retire Product to prove product market fit
Competitive Research
We looked at competitive landscape to see what other products in the same category were offering.
Wealthfront
Clean interface with emphasis on elements of growth over time. Graph UI gives the user confidence over their money
Betterment
Functional interface with an emphasis on investment split in the users account
Fidelity
Functional interface with an emphasis on the user’s balance and YTD
Lo-Fidelity Design
In this phase, I conducted a design workshop to collaborate with cross functional team members across product and engineering.Convergent themes
- Empowerment
- Knowledge and education
- Support
- Ease of interaction

Hi-Fidelity Design
Once the low-fi designs were finalized, I presented them to stakeholders to get feedback. I moved into the Hi-fi stage and leveraged the design system I created to pull everything together. After that, I partnered with Product and Engineering to launch this new product to our user base.
