Shareworks by Morgan Stanley drives adoption and addresses friction amid the dual pressures of coronavirus and spiking demand

In the coronavirus era, fintech product teams are being forced to find new ways to engage users to inform their product roadmaps. On top of that, this year’s market volatility has caused unprecedented investor engagement in the markets, leading to record-breaking new customers for investment platforms like Shareworks by Morgan Stanley, an equity management platform that enables employers to offer investment options to their employees.

Jon Jensen, the director of product focusing on private markets at Shareworks, has been in the thick of that situation since the spring. Pendo has been helping his team adapt by guiding their product planning and offering users in-app onboarding and support.

Jensen recently joined Pendo’s “Mastering Product Management in a Regulated Industry,” where he discussed product management in the fintech industry amid COVID-19, and how his team is using Pendo to adjust their strategy and serve customers.

Keep a finger on the product’s pulse

Collecting NPS through Pendo became a lifeline for Shareworks, taking the place of focus groups and the off-the-cuff answers they often produce. Virtual meetings have been an acceptable stand-in, but combining Pendo’s NPS data and in-app usage analytics has provided Jensen with a more accurate and powerful way to correlate user satisfaction and feedback with in-app behaviors.

Expanding in-app support in a remote work era

Pairing together Pendo analytics with in-app guides allows Jensen to understand where new users were getting stuck and place guides and tool tips to help drive adoption of the platform. With usage of fintech platforms ticking up during the pandemic and users lacking the ability to just “lean across the desk” and ask a colleague for help, Pendo guides provided a much-needed self-service function by directing users to relevant support content as they worked through the platform.

“[These platforms] are big, and there is a lot to them. We have to transition away from this idea that you can always go run and ask someone a question, and more towards something where we’re thinking about the flows that our clients are using and baking in a little more guidance across the board,” Jensen says.

Pendo data is also helping Jensen’s team identify features with low adoption or usage so they can prioritize improvements. This proactive feature enhancement ensures users don’t become more frustrated the more they use the platform.

Being product-led and letting data tell the story

Pendo isn’t just helping the Shareworks team decide where to take their products now and in the near future; it’s also giving them the information they need to decide where not to take them. That prevents valuable time and resources from being spent on product decisions that turn out to be wrong.

Jensen says data from Pendo lets his team provide metrics like adoption rate or usage trends for the sales, customer relationship, and customer success teams, enabling them to enhance their conversations with customers with objective data.

Pendo data has also allowed Jensen to show the company’s legal and compliance officers how changes that need to be made to the platform due to new or changing financial industry regulations will affect users, for better or worse.

That way, when those officers protest the changes or worry they’ll have negative effects on the user experience, Jensen said, “we can actually say that we’re watching it, and as of now, that hasn’t happened. It just helps to tell that story so you can keep those two needs in balance.”