Taxes for Hedge Funds

TL;DR

A Big Four accounting firm managed nearly 100 independently built internal and client-facing tax applications — each with its own UX, tech stack, and team. I led a cross-disciplinary effort to transform this fragmented ecosystem into a unified design-driven platform. We established a reusable design system, user-centered delivery process, and experience KPIs that cut duplication, improved consistency, and accelerated new product delivery across global teams.

Background

The firm’s Tax & Accounting technology group had evolved through regional silos. Each business unit built bespoke tools for similar workflows — managing, calculating, and reporting client tax data. This fragmentation created operational inefficiencies, poor user experience, and rising maintenance costs.

The Challenge

Create one cohesive platform experience out of hundreds of independent tools.

Our goal was to move from siloed, developer-driven product development to a user-centered, design-led platform strategy — one that could scale across global regions, user roles, and tax products.

Why it mattered:

• Hundreds of duplicative apps meant redundant development cost and inconsistent user experiences.
• Lack of a shared design language slowed feature delivery and increased onboarding friction.
• Leadership needed a clear, data-backed way to measure experience quality across the portfolio.

My Role

As Team Lead and Design Strategist, I:

• Defined and operationalized a UCD-driven delivery process across research, design, and engineering.
• Built and scaled a responsive design system and component library based on atomic design principles.
• Mentored designers and developers to align on quality, consistency, and user outcomes.
• Partnered with data strategists to establish UX KPIs and behavioral analytics frameworks.
• Served as a strategic liaison with client leadership to align roadmap, resourcing, and communication.

Approach

1. Customer Insights

We mapped the diverse needs of associates, partners, and client CFOs through contextual inquiry, interviews, and usability testing. This informed our personas, behavioral models, and ethical research practices.

Key Deliverables:

• Personas & “postcards from the field” research artifacts
• Consolidated insights decks for executive alignment
• Usability test reports feeding directly into design sprints
  

Leadership Impact:

I defined the research scope, integrated it into agile delivery, and personally led key contextual and usability sessions. By embedding insights into sprint reviews, I shifted stakeholder perception of design from “aesthetics” to evidence-based decision making.

2. Design

We built a modular design system spanning responsive web, native mobile, and multi-brand themes. Parallel to systemization, we redesigned the most complex tax applications to reduce cognitive load and streamline workflows.

Key Deliverables:

• End-to-end design system: component library, templates, and usage guidelines
• Redesigned responsive web and mobile experiences
• Annotated design documentation for development integration
  

Leadership Impact:

I created the product roadmap, defined delivery models, mentored a 7-person design team, and personally led co-creation workshops with client stakeholders. This effort established a shared design vocabulary across global teams and became the foundation for a firm-wide design ops model.

3. Development

In partnership with engineering, we implemented a living digital style guide and reusable front-end framework to ensure cross-team consistency.

‍

Key Deliverables:

• HTML/CSS component library
• Implementation documentation & analytics integration
  

Leadership Impact:

I managed the interface between design and development, ensuring assets were ready before sprint hand-offs and guiding dev leads on scalable implementation. I also coached team leads on communication and presentation skills to strengthen cross-disciplinary collaboration.

4. Data Strategy

We established experience KPIs to measure usability and adoption across all applications. These metrics informed roadmap priorities and provided ongoing visibility to executive stakeholders.

Key Deliverables:

• Experience KPI framework and benchmark analytics
• Implementation guide for instrumentation
• Ongoing reporting dashboards
  

Leadership Impact:

I partnered with the data team to align behavioral metrics to user journeys and platform objectives, ensuring analytics measured experience quality, not just clicks.

5. Experience Strategy

To unify all streams, I maintained the overall product roadmap, facilitated communication between internal and client teams, and resolved blockers before they reached delivery.

Key Deliverables:

• Platform roadmap & communication plan
• UCD process documentation for client adoption
• Cross-team alignment workshops
  

Leadership Impact:

This role accounted for nearly half of my time — orchestrating delivery, managing expectations, and ensuring the vision stayed cohesive across research, design, development, and data.

Outcomes

• Responsive platform design system adopted across 80+ applications
• Accelerated delivery through reusable front-end components and unified UX patterns
• Reduced redundancy in application development and improved maintainability
• Defined UX KPIs and analytics strategy for continuous experience improvement
• Shifted culture from developer-led to user-centered, measurable design practice

Reflection

This engagement exemplified the shift from design as artifact creation to design as organizational capability. Beyond visuals, the real transformation lay in aligning multiple disciplines around a shared process and language — creating a scalable foundation for consistent, measurable, user-centered product development.