My Secure Advantage — Member Experience
From Fragmented Coaching to Centralized Success:
Designing a Platform That Improved Member Financial Well-Being by 91%
Overview: My Secure Advantage (MSA) is a B2B financial coaching service. If a company partners with MSA, the employees of that company get access to a robust, diverse team of financial coaches. MSA calls those employees who are getting financial coaching "members." When I joined the company, the primary method of a member getting help from a coach was through a phone call and email experience. As the Lead Designer, I was tasked with building our a logged-in member experience. I introduced a gamified, personalized content journey, incentivizing users toward better financial habits and complementing the award-winning coaching service that MSA offered.
Impact: On the business side, contributed to tangible sales by presenting high-fidelity prototypes and winning million-dollar contracts. For members, 91% avg. improvement in financial well-being, $715 avg. increase in monthly discretionary income.
Role
Sr. Product Designer
Duration
16 months
Team (Besides Me)
2 PM, 2 Eng, CTO, 10+ Money Coaches
Establishing Context
Why this project mattered for the business
Members now had all of their homework and financial all in one place. No longer needing to dig through emails.
Members now had a flexible platform to explore their own financial interests and goals, not just what they discussed with their coach in 30 min sessions.
Members could easily track goals, add new ones and gamify their financial goals in a new way.
Establishing Context
Key constraint: Limited development capacity
We only had 2 developers to work on this project. So determining MVP features vs v2 features was a huge strategic component here.
MVP → v2: Dashboard
The member’s dashboard is a great example of making hard decisions for the sake of development lift. In conjunction with designing the “ideal” version that would be shown to business leads, we had to start working on a 1.0 that would omit many key features.
Key features omitted in MVP:
a personalized action plan
data visualization for financial circumstances
gamified badging
MVP → v2: Onboarding / Financial Assessment
Another example of development time saved for our MVP was using an out-of-the-box tool like TypeForm to gather onboarding data, where our v2 would feature a more robust, personalized assessment.
Key Outcomes
Key Outcome 1
We established a centralized place for members to work on stuff when they weren’t on coaching calls.
This initiative mattered to us as a business because this moved the data entry process from being solely handled by coaches, to being handled on the member’s side as financial information changed. This helped us with more consistent and accurate financial reporting which helps us drive leads.
Organizing coach content
All assigned resources from a member's coach calls now had an easy-to-find home to refer back to.
Personalized action plan
Members could move in and out the goals that mattered to them — each goal with a wide range of helpful, relevant content.
Tertiary content
Members could explore further beyond the "boilerplate" content we assigned for each goal, making the experience truly custom to each member.
Key Outcome 2
We created a more personalized experience for members
This initiative mattered to us as a business because this moved the data entry process from being solely handled by coaches, to being handled on the member’s side as financial information changed. This helped us with more consistent and accurate financial reporting which helps us drive leads.
In-depth financial assessment
Beyond a simple TypeForm quiz, we built out a highly personalized assessment to ensure a personalized experience post-login.
Personalized financial scores
Based on assessment results we would calculate two metrics that could be improved over time: “Financial Health” and “Financial Stress” scores.
5 Keys
In addition to the main scores, we offered individual scores on key financial domains, such as “My Money” and “My Retirement.”
Handling adversity
Internal dispute: Balancing Data Integrity with User Experience
One of our internal debates was how much friction to introduce when members updated their goals or financial data. On one side, requiring coach approval for every update would ensure near-perfect data integrity but create bottlenecks and a heavy engineering lift. On the other, giving members unlimited freedom made the experience seamless but left the door open to incomplete or inaccurate data. As the design lead, I helped reframe the debate around a phased approach: in MVP we leaned toward member autonomy to encourage adoption, while earmarking coached verification features as part of a later version once engagement was proven. This allowed us to ship quickly, keep entry barriers low, and still plan for the longer-term goal of richer, more trustworthy data.
This is an example of absolute minimal friction for the member to input data / complete goals.
Conclusion: What I Learned, What I’d Do Differently
This project taught me the importance of balancing idealized vision design with the realities of development capacity. By designing both the “aspirational” versions for sales pitches and the lean MVP for actual build, I learned how to use design as both a strategic sales asset and a pragmatic delivery tool.
If I were to do this again, I’d invest earlier in a stronger measurement plan, tying each dashboard feature directly to target behavioral outcomes, not just usability outcomes. That would have made it easier to quantify and communicate ROI to both executives and enterprise buyers. I’d also push harder for lightweight experiments (like rapid prototyping financial assessment variants) earlier, to validate and de-risk before engineering lifted a finger. Ultimately, the project showed me how design can connect member success with enterprise revenue, and how critical it is to ruthlessly prioritize features when engineering resources are tight.
