PROJECT
Jeeves Bookkeeping
ROLE
Design lead
YEAR
2024
The opportunity
In order to capture higher transaction volume from our customers, we needed to add in the ability to export our transactional data to the tools our customers used to close their books at the end of the month.
Another way to say it is, people weren’t using Jeeves as much as they could because it was too hard to do the accounting work.
So I took a step away from our traditional PRD -> output way of working and started from an outcome oriented perspective. Here is a high level view of what the outcome model looked like.
The exploration
The first thing I did was to sit with our internal accounting team to understand what their process was, who they thought did it well, and what opportunities they thought would give us a competitive edge.
Watching them work, my first approach was to build an export tool. Our customers could arrange our data and set a scheduled download in a format they could upload to their ERP.
The second approach was to connect directly to their ERP, pull their mapping data and then present an experience where they could review and approve before uploading directly their ERP.
Radical enhancements
I worked with 2 different product managers, an engineering lead, and several stakeholders to discover the ins and outs of migrating data and how we needed to present the UI to our customers so they would be able to quickly validate our tool with their existing bookkeeping tools.
I also pushed for machine learning and automation. Review new transactions that hadn’t been previously approved, but automatically prepare known transactions.
The end result
After several iterations of trying to consume existing UI patterns and transitioning between roles in a single view, I decided to create a separate experience designed specifically for this task.
It also freed us to create a new role where the user could do bookkeeping tasks without being given top level admin access to accounts and features.
It required rethinking our core navigation, and introduced a net new way to display information.
This new feature gave us the boost we needed to close over 50mm combined ARR sales in Columbia, Mexico, and Brazil.
