Problem

Around a year into my time at FactSet, I shifted over to assist the Research SBU on a brand new application called Pitch Portal. Pitch Portal connects investment banks with corporate and private equity clients in the mergers and acquisitions space, giving bankers a way to accelerate due diligence on potential buyers and surface relationships and deals they might otherwise miss. Unlike most of my work up to that point, which involved maintaining and extending existing pattern libraries, this meant designing something from the ground up, for a platform that didn't exist yet.

Approach

This was also the first time I'd contributed to a brand new application rather than working within an existing one, which meant establishing patterns as I went instead of pulling from something already proven out in production. Pitch Portal had two genuinely different sets of users to design for: bankers on one side, who needed to move quickly through diligence and surface the right opportunities, and buyers on the other, who needed a clear, trustworthy way to evaluate what was in front of them. Designing for both meant thinking through two distinct user journeys inside one connected product, rather than designing a single flow and adapting it.