Simplifying equity management for founders & their teams
A full end-to-end redesign of how startup founders raise capital, issue equity grants, and give employees clarity on what ownership actually means — without needing a lawyer in the room.
The challenge was not making finance look pretty. It was making a legally sensitive workflow feel understandable, guided, and trustworthy for non-experts.
Overview
The opportunity behind the friction
Private company equity management is one of the most consequential and least understood workflows in the startup ecosystem. Founders issue stock options and SAFE notes that will shape their company's ownership structure for years — often using spreadsheets, email, and disconnected legal tools.
This project started when customer research surfaced a clear pattern: founders were completing tasks but not understanding what they'd done. Employees were receiving equity grants they couldn't interpret. And legal partners were spending hours cleaning up errors that better UX would have prevented entirely.
My contribution was not just designing UI. I helped shape the product response: defining where the experience was breaking down, which interventions would build trust, and how to sequence a complex financial workflow so that it felt guided rather than overwhelming.
"I don't mind doing the work. I mind not knowing whether I'm doing something irreversible the wrong way."
- Framed the broader opportunity across three distinct user types
- Led 18 discovery interviews and competitive audit across 7 platforms
- Mapped the end-to-end equity journey from grant to liquidity
- Designed three core workflows from concept through dev handoff
- Built a role-aware component system in Figma for scalability
- Reduce anxiety for founders operating in legally complex territory
- Give employees plain-language clarity on what their equity means
- Keep legal partners confident in accuracy and auditability
- Shorten the fundraising close from 11 days to under 5
The Problem
Founders operate inside legal and financial systems they don't fully understand
Startup equity management fails not because founders aren't trying — it's because the product experience was built for administrators, not for the people who actually need to make consequential decisions under time pressure.
The experience broke down across three compounding failure modes:
- Jargon without context. Terms like option pool, vesting cliff, and 409A valuation appeared in UI without explanation, creating hesitation and error.
- No visibility into consequence. Users couldn't see how their actions affected cap table ownership before confirming.
- Employees felt excluded. Grant recipients received documents they didn't understand and had nowhere to ask questions inside the product.
- Legal partners lost trust. Manual verification was common because the platform didn't expose its logic transparently enough.
One equity error caught late costs more in legal remediation than the entire annual subscription. The risk isn't just UX friction — it's company-level liability.
Current-state failure map: friction points across the equity issuance journey
Why This Work Matters
How this maps to complex product design roles
- Turned an ambiguous, multi-stakeholder problem into a structured product opportunity
- Designed for trust and transparency in a high-stakes financial context
- Translated backend logic — vesting schedules, cap table math, SAFE note mechanics — into understandable user-facing behavior
- Created journey maps, communication models, and component systems that cross-functional teams aligned around
- Focused on measurable outcomes: close time, support volume, engagement rate
- I work well in unclear problem spaces where the path forward doesn't exist yet
- I use systems thinking to connect business needs, user understanding, and technical constraints
- I move fluently from research and framing into polished, actionable product artifacts
- I champion the user inside cross-functional teams — PM, engineering, legal, and CS
- I care about whether the product works, not just whether it looks finished
- Operates under time pressure during fundraising closes
- Non-expert in equity law — relies on platform to guide decisions
- Fears making irreversible, costly errors
- Receives legal documents without plain-language context
- Can't evaluate compensation without understanding equity value
- No in-product channel to ask questions or track vesting
- Late engagement in the design process — a key mistake I corrected
- Power users of document review who needed workflow redesign
- Trust anchors: if they're satisfied, founders follow
Research & Insight
What I learned from discovery
I led a multi-method research sprint over six weeks, moving from individual interviews into behavioral analysis to triangulate where the experience was actually breaking down vs. where it just looked broken.
The biggest insight: users weren't confused about finance. They were confused about whether they were doing it right inside the product.
Journey map connecting user expectations, pain points, and intervention opportunities across the equity lifecycle
Users conflated legal complexity with product complexity. A confusing UI made founders feel like they were doing something legally wrong — even when they weren't.
Existing tools were built for admins. Employees — major equity stakeholders — had no way to understand their grants inside the product, eroding trust in the benefit itself.
Founders only used the product intensively during closes. Between rounds, the product felt irrelevant — causing re-learning at the worst moment: under deal pressure.
Strategy
Design principle: turn financial complexity into guided decisions
The product shouldn't expect founders to become mini-lawyers. It should ask the right questions in the right order, show consequences before confirmation, and build trust through visibility.
Process
How I approached the work
I moved through a rapid iterative cycle, aligning with PM and engineering at every gate to balance ambition with delivery reality.
Component library · color tokens, typography scale, buttons, inputs, and spacing system
Artifacts
How the strategy became product experience
These artifacts show how I translated system logic into a customer experience that is legible, actionable, and recoverable. Each screen addresses a specific moment of confusion or trust failure identified in research.
Equity grant wizard: guided selection with contextual education panel. ISO selected — plain-language explanation replaces legal jargon.
Fundraising scenario modeler: founders configure raise terms on the left and see real-time ownership impact on the right — before committing to any close
Edge Cases I Accounted For
Where the work becomes senior
High-stakes financial experiences don't fail on the happy path. They fail at the boundaries — when timing, user understanding, and system logic stop aligning.
- Founder tries to issue a grant before setting up an option pool — system must redirect, not fail silently
- Grant total would exceed the available pool — conflict shown before submission, with path to resolution
- 409A valuation has expired — legal compliance warning surfaced contextually in the grant flow
- Employee receives grant before accepting an offer — access state and communication timing designed explicitly
- ISO grants above $100k annual limit — platform flags the overage and explains NSO conversion
- Vesting acceleration on acquisition — scenario modeler accounts for single and double trigger
- Terminated employee with unvested shares — clawback state and communication flow designed end-to-end
- Legal counsel reviews document with comments — annotation flow designed within platform, not via email
Impact
Customer and business value
Results measured across two post-launch cohorts (90 days). Metrics aligned with product KPIs defined with the PM and data team before any design work began.
- Founders were guided through legally complex decisions instead of left to interpret them
- Employees understood what their equity meant before accepting — reducing confusion and support load
- Legal partners had annotatable documents inside the product — eliminating email review cycles
- Cap table health signals kept founders engaged year-round, not just during closes
- I used real friction signals to frame a broader product opportunity
- I mapped uncertainty across legal logic, system behavior, and user understanding
- I translated ambiguous business rules into a coherent customer experience
- I focused on decision-making quality and measurable outcomes, not visual deliverables alone
Good fintech UX is not decoration. It is risk reduction, comprehension, and momentum — making it safe to act, and clear what to do next.
Reflection
What this project says about how I work
- Engage legal counsel earlier. I underestimated how much employment attorneys reviewing documents on behalf of founders would become power users. Late engagement cost us one sprint of rework on document review UX.
- Design for the empty state. We shipped the cap table health dashboard without an early-stage empty state for companies with 1–3 stakeholders. Post-launch usage exposed the gap immediately.
- Daily engineering standups are the highest-leverage design habit. Implementation drift dropped significantly once I had a standing channel for real-time decisions.
- Measure which contextual education modules most effectively reduce legal review requests
- Test comprehension directly: "What happens to your shares if the company raises its next round?"
- Instrument the full employee portal funnel — grant view → grant understanding → grant acceptance
- Explore proactive AI-powered dilution alerts to keep founders ahead of consequential decisions
Design review in Figma: annotated specs for engineering handoff with edge cases, states, and decision rationale embedded directly in the file
I do my best work in ambiguous, high-stakes product spaces where financial logic, user trust, technical constraints, and cross-functional alignment all need to come together in one clear experience. I use research to define the right problem, systems thinking to design the right solution, and execution discipline to ship it well.
Want to talk through this work?
I'm happy to walk through the research, prototypes, or how I approached any specific design decision in this project.