Distilling a massively complex financial system into a compelling future. 

• Lead designer for the vision while overseeing other design initiatives
• Lead a team of content writers and PMs to produce an actionable vision story
• Lead an intern to produce a widely used MVP of our application

Through careful listening and processing of information, I was able to translate a highly complex process into a compelling future narrative. As a result, we painted a picture of a future that was absorbed throughout the Finance organization.

Understanding Period End Close

Period End Close (or PEC) for short, is the process of tallying up a company's financial numbers and reporting their financial health. It happens at regular intervals, monthly as well as quarterly and yearly. It’s incredibly complex and vitally important. When I landed at Workday, the company was beginning to build tools to manage this process. User and market research had already been conducted on accountants and the industry at large. But we lacked a compelling narrative around which to structure our vision of the future, which I was tasked with creating.

Helping everyone else understand period end close

I created a set of personas and diagrams based on our research. The personas were fairly traditional, but some of the explorations were free form, built as a way to help me understand the complicated life of a financial ledger. I worked with our researcher to validate with internal users and during regular customer calls. Those freeform explorations ended up being some of the most compelling outputs, as they broke down the most complicated concepts.

Crafting the narrative with Finance and Content

I was given access to our content design team to write the vision story. I oversaw a vigorous internal debate as to how “future” the vision narrative should be. Workday was new to finance, and it was difficult for product managers to imagine a world where we could compete with other established players. I wanted us to think big, but recognized insecurity in the organization, who were struggling to get their feet planted as the newest pillar of Workday functionality. 

We agreed on a medium-term vision, giving the product organization concrete steps to build in the crucial next few years. I collaborated with our head content writer and a rotating cast of 3-4 product managers to write the narrative. My challenge was to balance the technical detail with key story beats that everyone would understand.

Interviewing financial professionals and recording their ideas for the future. Note "Machine Learning"

We wrote two vision stories. The first narrative was the one our product managers had direct input on, which spoke to the highly specific and technical nature of corporate finance. The second was an abridged version everyone else could understand. I alternated between two workshops a week, writing and expanding the narrative and reviewing and editing the work with the content writer. We reviewed the work with customers to ensure we were resonating outside our bubble. 

Nigh unintelligible to civilians, this read as a brilliant piece of science fiction for Finance Professionals.

Creating a Compelling Interface

Despite breaking down hard concepts into a coherent narrative of this had yet yielded any actual interface designs. How could I create an accompanying interface while I was tied up writing a story and overseeing a parallel design project? Enter our intern. 

I wrote an end-to-end project with research and low and high fidelity designs for our first ever Period End Close Hub, a one stop shop for organizing company’s financial books. My biggest concern was access to users, but Workday has a complex financial process and a large team of accountants with strong opinions about our software, fortunately for us. I built in as much time with them as I could ask for. 

An ideation workshop to focus our designs. 

We conducted workshops with the internal accounting team, validating and updating the vision story along the way. Having the team build and reorganize paper prototypes gave us insight into the priorities of the financial team. Through this we learned collaborative task management and collaboration were the key, as PEC is a team sport. 

Delivering the Period End Close Hub

We delivered an expansive Figma prototype of the interface. The design effectively envisioned a team-first view of the process, where coordination and communication were conducted from a central interface that responded to the needs and workload of each user. The system provided insights as to progress and team velocity. We built in flexibility, realizing Accountants would complete some work inside of Workday but much of it outside the system, particularly in their old standby Excel.

A forward facing vision with a long life. 

• A promising narrative crafted from inputs from across the Finance spectrum
• Automation and collaboration features on the roadmap
• We hired our intern!
  

The success of the project was not immediate. At first, the hub concept seemed dead in the water following the departure of a key executive sponsor. As the vision circulated throughout the organization, the hub concept was resurrected and put into development. The explainer diagrams had a productive life of their own as reference material and discussion points, bridging the gap between finance and non-finance employees.