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, Retirement

Team

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 accounts

Business 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 time

Key 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.

Impact

+20%

of customers successfully created a new retirement

8%

funded their account in their first session

Reflection

Given the aggressive deadline of 3 months, I was able to leverage Stash’s existing design system to move quickly through design phases: problem definition, competitive analysis, prototyping, Low-Fi to Hi-Fi design to reach a viable to solution to provide a retirement solution for Stash’s user base.