Hybrid robo advisor
2017-2018
We were charged with creating an enhanced robo advisor with human advice called Fidelity Personalized Planning & Advice.
! Putting our new agile framework to the test, we were asked to get this to market in 9 months.
Product positioning
“Get a personalized plan and investment strategy that’s flexible as your life and your goals change”
Personalized Planning and Advice offering
Flex Funds (same underlying investments as Fidelity Go)
Goal-based profiling with digital “next best action”
1:1 phone coaching, digital advisor; proactive messaging
50 bps; $25k relationship min
Strategic advantages to Fidelity
Filled an unmet need within Fidelity’s advice spectrum
Offered rollover opportunity with a Workplace-equivalent product
Allowed Fidelity to scale its advice model via web and regional centers
Expanded on the Fidelity Go learning and platform development
My contribution
I led a team of content strategists and UX writers to create the end-to-end content strategy and all the content within the experience. In addition to constant collaboration with UXD and UXR, I worked closely with the marketing team to ensure that their go-to-market strategy was aligned with the product we were developing. I created processes, documentation, and built relationships across the tribe to ensure content had a seat at the table.
Initial challenges
New team/digital transformation
Shared challenges with the digital transformation
Team was in ‘forming’ stage
Lack of clear product direction
Uncertainty around roles and responsibilities
People doing jobs they didn’t ask for or want
Research, research, research
There was a plethora of information about the persona we were building for but nothing clearly showed us that she wanted or needed this product.
Every squad was doing their own research using different methods and research was mostly being used to validate features the squad wanted to build.
Time and pressure
We were given a launch date.
We were cutting corners to meet to the launch date which we knew would lead to a significant amount of tech and content debt.
Priorities changed frequently.
Teamwork and a collective desire to succeed drove positive outcomes
This large team was committed to getting the product launched and they overcame a lot of hurdles, uncertainty, and pressure to get it done. There was a lot of pride in the work we were doing and everyone wanted the product to succeed.
The content strategists worked like a single unit creating an end-to-end strategy and we had daily stand ups to talk through what they were doing in their squads and what challenges they were facing.
Segment marketing and UXR began to work together to wrangle all the research and organize it into a site we could all access. They did weekly research readouts to summarize the highlights and important findings.
We hired a consultant to help us narrow our focus on what we were going to launch with. Defining the MVP alleviated a lot of the swirl and new feature creation.
COLLABORATIVE DOCUMENTATION
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Uncovering the details
The team leaders for UXR, UXD, and Content worked closely together to document the end-to-end experience in Mural so everyone could see what was being built and who was on the team working on each section.
There were images of every screen in the experience. We listed all the team members involved in each piece of the experience and added links to relevant research, prototypes, or production sites.
The content team used this to ensure we were using consistent language throughout the experience. This also helped with legal conversations as sometimes we’d get approval in one part of the experience and that would get flagged in other parts of the experience. We could then have a conversation with the legal reviewers to understand the nuances and make the content consistent.
The teams updated it every week to keep it current.
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Saying it consistently
The content team documented a terminology guide that helped us and the marketing team remain consistent throughout the experience. We identified terminology that our persona related to and understood and also identified phrases and terminology that legal preferred (and words and phrases that were definitely NOT to be used).
We added links where appropriate to either legal comments or research so people could understand the rationale. This helped the working teams as well as gave us leverage in executive meetings when there were comments on language.
This was the beginning of our team’s product guide documentation and style guide evolution.
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Providing transparency
Each week, UXD would print out the Mural and put it on a public wall in the area where we worked. Everyone was welcome to come see the progress and add a Post It to comment on it. We regularly did executive tours and got feedback from them.
It was also used for weekly Tribe meetings. Squads would walk through their piece of the experience so everyone was informed on what each team was doing. This helped us make connections across the experience.
The content team also used this to examine the content throughout the experience to ensure we were consistent, on brand, and user friendly.
This product was our first deep foray into humanizing our language on the site and the app and there was a lot of executive attention on tone.
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Putting it in one place
The content team created a page in the tribe’s Confluence site where we could save our research, our style guide, rules of engagement, best practices, processes, etc.
Because some people were still new to working with us, we found we needed to educate people on how to work with us.
This also helped with transparency and sharing of information with the marketing team who was developing the go-to-market strategy.
We documented legal requirements like the first use of the product name had to be trademarked but future uses on that screen did not.
The content design process
The majority of the collaborative design experience was in Mural and Sketch. We hadn’t started using Figma as a firm yet. Content strategists worked closely with designers in Sketch and Mural to keep content updated in the designs. Depending on the squad, content was also heavily involved in design decisions and had a strong voice in the direction of the product.
We were still using copy decks in Word at the time so content strategists were doing double time keeping an updated Word doc and updated design files. So, there were of course the usual issues of developers using outdated designs to update production content. And of course, a few lorem ipsums got into executive presentations. But, overall, this is one of the best product design experiences I’ve ever had. As with many things at Fidelity, it came down to the people. When you have a lot of smart, talented, kind, creative, and motivated people working together, good things happen.
We did it!
We made our deadline and launched to employees in October 2017, with the national launch in July, 2018.
