Founding designer, pivoting with major bets.
$1M → $500M+ AUM. 0 → 15+ enterprise firms.

00 — The Real Jobs to be Done

The assumption vs. what clients actually wanted

Opto's business was straightforward on paper: sell private funds — the warehouse funds Opto had invested in — to RIAs (financial advisors, our B2B users) who served ultra‑high‑net‑worth clients (the B2B2C end-investors). The pitch to RIAs leaned on Opto's in-house technology for filling SubDocs, the tedious subscription paperwork that had historically been a barrier to private markets. The assumption was that if we removed the paperwork pain, RIAs would confidently move client capital into warehouse funds.

Months passed with almost no conversion. RIAs were engaging with the platform, but clients weren't clearing the $100K minimum. I stopped accepting the existing narrative and went back to first principles — running research and direct interviews with advisors and end-clients to pressure‑test every assumption underneath the funnel.

The finding reframed the entire product strategy. Clients weren't rejecting warehouse funds, and RIAs weren't rejecting the SubDoc tooling — both were genuinely useful. The gap was that no one wanted to put a $100K minimum into a single fund. That insight led directly to the discovery of Custom Funds: a pool that let clients buy smaller slices across multiple warehouse funds, turning one concentrated bet into a diversified private‑markets allocation.

01 — Context

Where it all started

When I joined Opto in mid-2022 as one of the founding designers, the product was early — really early. The platform had educational videos and articles to teach RIA advisors about private markets, a recommendation engine built around three model portfolios, and a subscription document flow that digitized what had traditionally been mountains of paperwork.

The software was ahead of its time. While the rest of the industry was still processing subscription documents on paper and fax, Opto had built a TurboTax-style digital questionnaire that walked advisors through the complex regulatory steps. The technology was there. The product-market fit was not.

The original recommendation modal — preset model portfolios with no room for advisor judgment.

02 — First Initiative

Breaking the recommendation model

My first project was rethinking the entry point. The existing model forced advisors into pre-defined portfolios — select a model, pick an investor, and allocate money to a preset mix of funds. There was no personalization, no flexibility, and no room for an advisor's own judgment.

I designed and built a "Quick Checkout" flow — a streamlined path that let advisors bypass the recommendation engine entirely. An advisor could log in, browse individual funds, select one or more for a specific client, indicate dollar amounts, and move directly into the subscription process. It was a deliberate bet on giving advisors agency over their allocations instead of prescribing a model.

Even with easier access to individual funds, the company struggled to get buy-in from investors. Advisors weren't converting. The problem wasn't the checkout flow — it was something more fundamental about how we were asking people to invest.

03 — The Turning Point

Finding the real fear

After months of slow adoption, we stopped building and started listening. I worked closely with the sales team, sat in on advisor calls, recorded sessions, and dug into every piece of qualitative data we could find.

The data told a clear story: investors cared more about investing across a mix of asset classes than about any specific fund. They wanted $100K spread 50/50 across Private Equity and Venture Capital, not $100K locked into a single Tacora Fund. It was the difference between a diversified portfolio and a one-way bet.

That insight changed everything. What if instead of selling individual funds, we gave investors a bespoke cocktail — a custom vehicle made of multiple slices across asset classes, tailored to their preferences, not restricted to a pre-built model portfolio? We called the concept a "Blind Pool," then a "Semi-Blind Pool," and eventually landed on the name that stuck: Custom Funds.

Early brainstorming sessions mapping the shift from Blind Pools to Custom Funds — defining user roles, actions, and the lifecycle that would power the pivot.

The Shift, Visualized

04 — Custom Funds

Designing the infrastructure that scaled the business

Custom Funds wasn't a feature — it was a new business model that required an entirely new set of tools, workflows, and user roles. And I was designing all of it alone. A year into my tenure, I became the sole designer at the company for nearly another full year — owning research, product design, and shipping across every surface while also delegating design needs for marketing and sales collateral, and leading the hiring process to build out the design team. As the only designer, I mapped the complete lifecycle from fund creation to capital deployment, identifying every touchpoint where a CIO, advisor, operations team member, or investor would interact with the system.

The Custom Fund lifecycle I designed for

This pivot demanded a new portal entirely. The existing Advisor app couldn't support fund creation — that was the domain of CIOs, the decision-makers who research funds, structure vehicles, and set the investment strategy for their firms. I designed the CIO platform from zero: a research hub where CIOs could evaluate funds across asset classes, create Custom Funds for their firm, and monitor whether advisors were raising capital against them.

On the Advisor side, the app evolved significantly. Custom Funds surfaced as investable vehicles alongside the original offerings. I redesigned the subscription flow to accommodate the new fund structure while maintaining the TurboTax-like simplicity that was already working. The Investor portal followed — giving end clients access to tax documents, holdings, and eventually the fund updates that became one of our most valued features.

04b — Scaling Design

Growing the team, raising the bar

While I owned the Advisor app end-to-end — the core product surface where advisors researched funds, committed capital, and managed client portfolios — we hired new designers who took on the CIO side of the platform: fund creation, monitoring, and the research tools that powered Custom Fund construction.

As the firm count grew, so did the stakes. Opto was moving closer to becoming a fiduciary-grade platform — the kind of software that RIA firms trusted to manage regulatory compliance, client capital, and reporting. That trust had to be earned visually, too. Advisors presenting Opto's tools in client meetings needed the interface to project credibility and sophistication. A polished, professional UI wasn't vanity — it was a business requirement that directly impacted advisor confidence and firm adoption.

Meanwhile: Design System 1.0 → 2.0

We couldn't pause shipping to redesign. So we evolved the design system while the product was in flight — replacing components, refining the visual language, and elevating the entire UI piece by piece. The goal was simple: make advisors look smarter in front of their clients, and make Opto look like the institutional-quality platform it was becoming.

‹ Home ›

05 — Confidence Tools

Building conviction with data: Planner & Pacing

Even with Custom Funds, advisors new to private markets hesitated. They understood the diversification benefit, but couldn't articulate to clients how these funds would perform over time or impact their overall portfolio. I needed to design tools that turned uncertainty into confidence.

Working closely with backend engineers, investment analysts, and the data team, I designed the Planner & Pacing tool — a system that modeled how private market investments would perform alongside a client's existing portfolio over time. But the problem wasn't just showing impact — it was helping advisors select the right funds for each specific client.

app.optoinvest.com/planner

To solve this, we bucketed investors into common preference profiles: Income, Growth, Balanced, and Custom model portfolios that firms could configure themselves. This categorization informed the pacing models and drove the design of a Bulk Investor Import flow I built to map client fields to model portfolios at scale, so firms could onboard their entire book efficiently.

05b — Beyond Design

The problem nobody was solving: how we build

As I was shipping features and running research, something kept nagging me. I was talking to every sales rep individually, and each one had a completely different take on where the product was falling short. Priorities were scattered, perspectives conflicted, and nobody seemed to have the full picture.

So I dug deeper. I ran structured interviews across the entire sales team — not to validate a design, but to understand where the organizational seams were tearing. What I found was systemic: Sales and Product had no regular syncs. Sales filed tickets requesting features or improvements, but those tickets landed in a backlog with no shared framework for prioritization. Every sprint was a negotiation between competing roadmap priorities, and nobody could articulate why one ticket mattered more than another or where it fit in the bigger picture.

I was curious how companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Spotify, and Linear managed this transition from scrappy startup to structured product org. The research led me to a term that crystallized everything: feature factory. We were shipping features in response to individual requests, but never stepping back to ask system-level questions or make room for innovation. Each team was solving their own problems, but the bigger opportunities — the ones that required cross-functional alignment — were falling through the cracks.

This wasn't a design deliverable — it was a structural intervention. The framework gave Product Managers a shared vocabulary to triage incoming requests, plan sprints with intention, and build quarterly roadmaps that balanced immediate needs with long-term bets. It changed how four PMs prioritized work, how engineering allocated capacity, and how the company thought about what to build next.

06 — A Three-Person Design Team

Three designers, three fronts, one platform

By this stage, the hiring work paid off and we grew into a three-person design team. I continued leading the Advisor app end-to-end and took on Radar as a 0→1 product, while the other two designers shipped Fund Updates (performance insights for investors) and AI Due Diligence (a standalone SaaS research tool for CIOs that became Opto's second revenue stream). Three designers, each owning a critical surface, shipping independently but building toward the same vision.

07 — My Parallel Products

Evergreen Funds and Radar: shipping on two fronts

Radar was a different kind of design challenge — not an extension of the existing product, but an entirely separate value proposition. Spending a week embedded at Fi3's office, observing how advisors actually rebalanced portfolios (spoiler: spreadsheets and gut feel), gave us the signal we needed to validate the hypothesis and refine the product before broader rollout.

08 — The Evolution

From scrappy startup to scaled platform

09 — Outcomes

Impact by the numbers

10 — Decisions

Key design decisions

10b — System-Level Thinking

Small reframes, disproportionate impact

Beyond large product bets, I tend to look for system-level inefficiencies where small reframes can unlock disproportionate impact. Across these stories, my role wasn't improving usability. It was identifying where the system itself was misaligned with how users think, work, and decide.

11 — Reflections

What I took away