EquityZen Investor Marketplace

Fintech · UX Research · Stakeholder AlignmentPublished

FintechResearchB2B

EquityZen research repository in MixPanel — We began building features to help increase deal flow while tailoring investment recommenedations to the user, surfacing the conflicting beliefs each team held about user behavior. (Adjusted for confidentiality)

The Problem

EquityZen's internal tools were built reactively with no user research foundation. Product, Sales, and Engineering each held different — and often conflicting — assumptions about user needs, leading to misaligned priorities and repeated rework.

Feature building exercise — The research repository in MixPanel. Insights are tagged by theme, linked to evidence, and mapped to open product questions. (Adjusted for confidentiality)

Research Methods

I established a structured research cadence: bi-weekly moderated user interviews, task-based usability tests on prototypes, and async prototype feedback sessions with power users in the Sales and Deals team.

User interview discussion guide — Built flowmaps and user personas after conducting our user interviews. The new workflows were structured around mental models and not feature preferences. (Adjusted for confidentiality)

Affinity mapping of research findings — Post-interview affinity mapping, 80+ observations from 12 interviews clustered into 6 actionable insight themes. (Adjusted for confidentiality)

From Insights to Product

Each research cycle fed directly into sprint planning. I created a living insight repository in Notion — tagged by theme, linked to supporting quotes, and connected to open product questions. Findings stopped living in research docs that nobody read.

Research insights mapped to shipped features — The insight-to-feature chain: research observation → validated insight → product decision → shipped feature. Closing this loop is what made the research program stick. (Adjusted for confidentiality)

Outcome

Research insights directly shaped product direction for the platform. Complex internal tools shipped for the Sales and Deals team, improving dealflow efficiency. Each research method became a permanent fixture in the product development cycle.

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