Facilitating New Partner Onboarding at Even Financial

As part of the product team at Even Financial, I was able to help develop their partner facing SaaS platform, ‘Portal’. At the time, Even’s partners and internal account managers relied on two fragmented admin systems designed and built quickly by engineers early in Even’s history. The vision for Portal was to not only serve as a unified system for the internal team but provide transparency, analytics, and efficient work flows to external partnerships as well.

At the genesis of this product, I worked closely with the product manager and both internal and external stakeholders to determine a long term objective-based roadmap in an attempt to insure the feasibility and success of the product as a whole.

This case study will focus on the first objective within that roadmap.

Objective

As part of the larger company objective to expand our partner network, portal was tasked with accelerating the time it takes to onboard new partnerships. Our goal was to reduce new partner account setup by at least 50% in Portal.

Role

For this project, I was the lead product designer and collaborated heavily with the product manager and a team of 3 engineers

At the start of this project, we learned that it took anywhere from 3-9 days for a single supply partner to be fully onboarded from contract signed to live in production. While the sales team and account managers were actively working on improving their workflows, there was a noticeable bottleneck occurring when it was time for a new partner to be set up in the system and receive assets to begin testing and sending traffic.

Qualitative Research

In addition to seeing the data and workflow for the onboarding process, we also learned that there was a significant knowledge gap adding to the burden. Much of the process for setting up the partner’s assets was not intuitive and required a 10 page document to explain the process step by step. Most users that were performing these tasks admitted they were often blindly following the documented steps without full understanding the reasoning or the implications.

We also dug further into specific aspects of the onboarding process. When it came to setting up the assets required for a new partner to begin using the Even API, we learned that the majority of new partners were integrating with Even’s hosted experiences instead of accessing the API directly. The setup process for these assets left a lot to be desired in it’s current state:

• Partners had to rely on their account managers to setup and customize each new partner page manually before they can begin sending traffic and getting paid.
• Account managers were not able to preview changes made to individual partner pages without publishing them to the public.
• Demand partners often required visibility into their offerings within the context of Even’s partner page or embedded experiences and account managers find it difficult to find and take screenshots.
• Not all configurations were intuitive enough to understand exactly what will happen on the front end. Many users complained about lack of transparency around the implications of enabling or changing certain parameters and knowing which configuration will help them achieve a specific result.

User Flows

By working with the tech ops team, we witnessed how tedious and manual each step in the onboarding process was.

Using the existing fragmented admin systems, it took a proficient tech ops or account manager 30 minutes to set up a single supply partner account. For anyone less experienced or new to the process, it took 45 minutes on average.

It was also a very error-prone process which was causing issues for the team and at times, for the partnerships.

We worked with engineering to determine how much of this process we could automate. We were able to distill down a 13-step process fragmented across 3 systems to a simple 4-step process all completed within the partner portal.

Prototype

Using the existing design system and flow patterns established ahead of portal production, I created a set of prototypes to validate the workflow and work out any edge cases. We were able to capture the bulk of the process within a single form, automating the most tedious parts of the process. The real challenge was creating a WYSIWYG editor for the partner assets. This was important for our account managers to set up the assets but also for partners to view make their own customizations down the line.

Onboarding a new partner within this portal flow, took no longer than 10 minutes for users of any proficiency, resulting in a 77% decrease in onboarding time.

In addition, the improved portal experience made onboarding possible by everyone on Even’s partner management team expanding their onboarding capacity even further.