Demystifying equity for employees
When I joined Cake, I had no idea how equity works. Saving up, budgeting, and cold hard cash are my domain in household finances. Investing? Shares? That’s my wife’s problem. Over the 3 months I spent at Cake, I quickly learned the ropes and designed an equity management app for rookies (like me) and pros (like my wife) alike.
🍰 Background
Cake Equity is an online cap table tool for enterprises. It targets 3 main user groups and offers the following value propositions for each:
Analyse cap table, plan funding rounds, offer ESOP to employees
Manage investment portfolio
Manage stock options and ESOP offers
👨🏼💻 Employees: A Problem Space
At this point, startup founders and investors were relatively well-served by the product. There were tons of data to sift through and insights on the company to analyse that Cake facilitated. The employees, well, not so much. We wanted to get employees excited about their ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) offers and educate them on how valuable their equity can be in the long run.
Ultimately, our aim was to develop a consumer-grade financial product for employees, that might be checked as frequently as one would their bank balance, investments, or super.
Keeping in mind the resource and time constraints, I set out to understand the employee’s perspective by interviewing a small sample of family and friends who receive equity remuneration from their work. As part of the process, I asked them to walk me through the finance software that they use. The results are synthesised below.
| Pain | Gain |
|---|---|
| Don’t know enough about equity to: - Interpret data accurately - Make decisions confidently | Put portfolio balance at the forefront |
| Just want to know how much “money” they have and can “withdraw” | Be more informative as to when the options will vest next, and by how much |
🧠 Solution Space
Unlike the startup founder dashboard which is oftentimes accessed via desktop, we knew we wanted the employee app to be a mobile-first responsive design so that it would be accessible anytime and anywhere.
I iterated on the design from paper sketches to high fidelity prototype.
