Platform: Web
Private company equities are like Monopoly money. It sure looks good on paper. You can also dream about what they could be worth. Yet, unless you get lucky and your company goes public or gets acquired, they're pretty much worthless.
The good news is that many companies are going public these days (rose 87% in Q3/2021 and 99% YoY), but there is also a good chance that companies are staying private longer. This is when tender offers come in; it's a liquidity event where companies buy back stocks from their employees.
The different user types
Three main user types are involved in a tender offer:
For this case study, I'll focus on the sellers/shareholders experience.
Shareworks is one of the few equity compensation products that support these tender offers on the market. We already have an experience for the sellers since 2017, but it was "designed" by PMs and developers without being thoughtful about the users; hence, it didn't perform very well. For example, data shows that there is only a 36% participation rate because the workflow is often confusing and contains financial jargon that is not helpful to an average person. Additionally, it was built on an older technology stack (GWT), limiting what we could do or improve.
Old tender offer experience
By the end of 2019, it was clear that the tender offers market was getting more attention from our clients and competitors. Many assets under management (AUM) also flowed through this channel, although we could not fully capture it. So it was about time to give this experience a complete overhaul with proper user research and design. That was when I took the lead on this project.