UX Research
Product Design
Design Leadership
Realized Marketplace and DAT
Designing the investment platform that thinks like an analyst, inside a 45-day IRS clock.
Industry
Fintech
Year
2020–2022
Timeline
2 years
The research question: How do investment analysts build IRS-compliant 1031 exchange portfolios fast enough to beat a 45-day clock, and what would it take for software to do the heavy lifting? Context: Realized helps clients divest investment properties and defer capital gains through 1031 exchanges. The business needed an MVP that could optimize exchange portfolios, improve diversification, reduce risk, and keep every recommendation inside IRS compliance, with the 45-day replacement guideline as the hard constraint. It also had to streamline analyst and sales workflows and move annual equity flow faster.
Solution
My role: Lead Product Designer and Senior Researcher. Solo designer through most of the pandemic. Started in a team of three (CTO, senior PM, me) and later mentored two junior designers as the team grew. Process: outcomes first, then research, hypotheses, design, prototype, test, learn. Research artifacts: personas for RIAs and analysts, flow diagrams, card sorting, whiteboard sessions, and a full usability research report. The research did double duty: it shaped the product and educated executives on what UX actually contributes.
Outcome
Outcomes at a glance: $396M client equity invested through the platform, $9.5M+ revenue generated, 600+ client investments supported (as of March 2022). What shipped: the Digital Advice Tool, an MVP integrating third-party data, property risk scores, and scenario analysis to build and compare investment portfolios; and a marketplace redesign with verification-first investor login, offering discovery with filtering and due-diligence detail, and a dynamic Investment Plan tab that replaced static PDFs. Learnings: solo design through the pandemic forced ruthless prioritization; adopting Material Design as the design language bought speed without sacrificing quality; the difference between a beautiful prototype and a tool professionals trust was close collaboration with subject-matter experts.
