LPL Financial · Financial services · Phase 1 of 3
Zero to one: launching Paraplanning Services
We built and launched a paraplanning service, zero to one, so advisors could hand off financial plan preparation to LPL internal planners and instead focus on growing their businesses. It grew fast but exposed real gaps we'd have to fix.
- Role
- Principal Product Designer
- Duration
- Oct 2022 to fall 2023
- Team
- Product Managers (4)
5 LOB delivery leaders and their staffs
Client Success leader and staff (5)
Product Owner
Developers and QA (7) - Responsibilities
- 0→1 design executionDiscovery researchRequirements definitionDesign strategyProject managementWorkshop facilitationCoaching and mentoring
Impact
▲833%
Subscriber growth
post-launch
▲80%
Team growth
post-launch
▲220%
Plans delivered/month
post-launch
▼57%
Plans per advisor/month
post-launch
The problem
A service that worked in pilot couldn't scale, because there was no system underneath it.
LPL's Paraplanning Services lets advisors offload the labor-intensive work of building financial plans to home-office, internal LPL financial planners. It grew to about 75 advisors in pilot, but our internal planners suffered swivel-chairing across email, spreadsheets, scattered files, and sticky notes. There was no system of record and no shared tool for work. Advisors had the same problem. More important, they had no visibility into the work being done for them. Service capacity was tapped, even as launch was closing in.
How I worked the problem
I inherited a service stuck between a broken foundation and a launch date, and worked it on every front at once.
01
First, I made the team able to build, then took on the worst screen.
Four constraints shaped our first months: an ad hoc foundation, thin staffing, vague requirements, and outdated research. Nobody on the project had talked to a user firsthand. So before I could design, I had to clear the blockers and talk to users myself. The table below breaks each one down.
“A piece of the foundation emerges over here and we all rush to build on it. Then another piece emerges over there, and we rush to build on that.”
View the four constraints, and how I answered them
The constraint
How I answered it
The technical foundation was built ad hoc and couldn’t fully support the vision for the first three to four months of the build.
Sequenced the work to the foundation
I set a bi-weekly cadence with the product manager to plan around which capabilities would be ready when, so we built in the right order instead of stalling.
Understaffed and underbudgeted, with devs building everything from scratch and decreasing throughput.
Built for reuse, estimated with confidence
I coached the devs toward building reusable components. Then I held regular check-ins with them to show wires, get accurate LOEs, and simplify where needed. This enabled me to speak authoritatively about cost and complexity on calls.
An inexperienced product owner writing vague, UI-prescriptive stories.
Made the requirements buildable
The product manager and I coached the product owner on writing outcome-based stories and acceptance criteria the squad could build clearly from.
No firsthand research. The consultancy’s incubator-era artifacts gave us context, not current insight into what users needed.
Put the user back in the room
I stood up a lightweight, agile research function: Jobs To Be Done plus scheduled validation and ad hoc hallway intercepts that fed true user insights into the design process.
The worst screen: intake.
The inherited intake crammed every field, plus a 30-row document table, onto one screen. I fixed it in two moves: the cheapest one first, then the real one when that wasn't enough.
- One dense form, no sense of sequence.
- No sense of progress.
- Muddled hierarchy.
When numbering wasn't enough, I broke the form into a guided wizard with a persistent review rail: live progress, inline edits, and a running total billed, so the advisor always knew where they were and what it would cost.
02
Then I bet on the internal planners in order to increase service delivery capacity, and let research lead.
With the team moving, I argued, and won, to redesign the internal planner experience before the advisor-facing one. The workflow and Jobs To Be Done research I stood up paid off surfacing a rich, prioritized picture of what our planners needed.
What the research surfaced · 18 hotspots and their proposed solutions
Threaded, searchable communications
BrokeMessages and internal notes sat in two flat columns, no threading or search.
CausingAdvisor asks slip through the cracks.
WantedConsolidated communications in one place, threaded and searchable, with attachments.
Shippedthe plan-detail redesign below
Advisor training and explainers
BrokeAdvisors don’t really understand plan tiers, so they choose the wrong plan types.
CausingExcessive scope negotiation and service encounters during production, delaying delivery.
WantedAdvisor-facing tier explainers, internal training, and tech that suggests the right type.
Folded inbecame part of the Onboarding Revamp
Task management
BrokeNonexistent. Hard to know what needs attention right now, and no way to prioritize a full basket of jobs.
CausingPlans at risk of missing SLAs, tasks scattered across different tools and sticky notes, and no way to prioritize or re-prioritize the day.
WantedFull task management capabilities in the app to prioritize work and generate tasks and playbooks from planner activity.
Deferreddiscovery research done, never picked up for the roadmap · the gap I’d keep arguing, proven in the mapping work
View all hotspots and why almost none got built
The hotspots map
Here's the hard part. Almost none of this got built.The platform, budget, and roadmap could absorb only the smallest changes. So, the map largely became a backlog and record of unmet demand.
However, we did ship "Threaded, searchable communications," and all of the references to broken or non-existent processes became the backbone of the next case study, "Map the gap: standardizing five planning services." Finally, the advisor training and digital onboarding requests became the crux of the third case study, "Evolving the service."
The other 15, step through with the arrows →
Digital onboarding
BrokeOnboarding is manual, redundant, and low-quality. Advisors get onboarded before they’re ready to work with a plan manager.
CausingSignificant production inefficiencies and delays.
WantedAutomated, self-serve, trackable onboarding and training, plus a decision tree that confirms readiness and improves advisor and planner pairing.
Folded inbecame part of the Onboarding Revamp
Plan summary configurator
BrokePlan summaries were built manually in Word with difficult templates.
CausingSlow production, errors, and summaries that couldn’t match an advisor’s brand.
WantedA digital configurator that takes all plan info and automatically produces the final deliverable.
Deferred
Automated document OCR
BrokeFields live in a different place on every non-LPL account and across documents.
CausingHours lost finding data, transcription errors, no way to trace a number.
WantedThe client links the docs. The system scans, records, and validates the data. Doc-to-data.
Deferred
Process playbooks
BrokeNo standard process for how to deliver plans existed.
CausingInconsistent quality across the service, longer planner training cycles, protracted production, frequent interruption of other planners.
WantedA playbook in the app that guides each step and enforces process by plan status.
Deferred
Knowledge base and help content
BrokeNo self-serve, searchable place to go for help, so the whole group stops to help find an answer on Teams.
CausingFrequent production interruptions.
WantedOne searchable, self-serve place for answers.
Deferred
Plan-type chooser
BrokeNo shared definition of Core, Comprehensive, or Advanced.
CausingMisquoted plans and work done at the wrong price.
WantedA decision tool that lets advisors submit info and docs and be told what plan type to choose.
Deferred
Capacity planning and forecasting
BrokeManagers had to manually gauge team capacity.
CausingUneven workload distribution, rushed plans, frustrated staff.
WantedTooling that assigns plans by skill and availability and forecasts future load.
Deferred
Proof of contribution
BrokeOnly plan cost and revenue is visible. New accounts and products bought by customers go untracked, so real contribution can’t be measured.
CausingDecreased morale.
WantedA dashboard to surface total value created by the team: ClientWorks transfers, new products sold.
Deferred
Fact Finder integration
BrokePlanners have to manually issue follow-up questions.
CausingAn error-prone process and missing information.
WantedPrepopulated follow-ups integrated with Fact Finder, answers back in one place.
Deferred
Client-facing view of value created
BrokeNo existing way to do this, and current metrics don’t capture the client value the team creates.
CausingDecreased morale and no way to accurately show performance.
WantedA client-facing view of actions taken, value created, and what’s next.
Deferred
Plan update standards and template
BrokeNo standard process or definitions for a plan update exist.
CausingAdvisor confusion and dissatisfaction, advisors trying to get other work done inside an update, planners checking with Client Success, slowed production.
WantedA Plan Update Summary template and an advisor-facing deliverable that explains the plan update product.
Deferred
Voice to text
BrokeInternal planners had to manually take notes during advisor meetings.
CausingKey info gets missed and plan quality decreases.
WantedVoice-to-text transcription.
Deferred
Cross-department integration
BrokeTracking a plan’s recommendations was manual.
CausingVery high admin burden and difficulty implementing recommendations.
WantedOne consolidated place, integrated with LPL departments, that pushes recommendations live and tracks them.
Deferred
Robo-planner for core plans
BrokeA core plan takes twice as long to build, time that could go to higher-value work.
CausingA clogged pipeline.
WantedSystem-provided answers for common core-plan questions.
Deferred
Shared team calendar, presence, and OOO process
BrokeAs the team grows, no standard out-of-office process or message.
CausingProduction delays and advisor frustration.
WantedStandard OOO, clear coverage assignments, and a shared team calendar in the app.
Deferred
And those findings quickly came back up against platform and project constraints.
The platform's limits set in fast: the app and roadmap could absorb only a fraction of what research surfaced.
So we shipped smaller features with a few key design wins. The clearest is the plan-detail page below, where we delivered a consolidated communications feature and an easier-to-read layout. Short of the full redesign the internal planning team and I wanted, but welcomed all the same.
Plan detail, before & after
Calmer top
The crowded status strip and inline info row collapse into one Overview grid. Status becomes a single labeled control. The page opens quiet and parseable.
The rail earns its space
A static notes column becomes an active, scannable feed, tabbed, counted, and sorted by recency instead of a flat wall of text.
One job per region
Clear section headers (Overview, Notes, Documents, Communications) give each part of the page a single, obvious purpose.
View selected screens from the shipped product
A few selected screens from the shipped product.
03
Then the hardest stretch: integrating new business lines and losing a redesign pitch.
Right before launch, we learned we'd be integrating four more Planning Services LOBs into the app: Tax Planning, Advanced Planning, Estate Planning, and Custom Portfolio Construction. I was concerned the inherited card-based UI would not scale, so I pushed hard for a redesign that could.
Inspired by my previous BuildOnMe experience, where I learned how gracefully ServiceNow manages scaled data and workflows, I made a few low-fi wireframes to demonstrate the concept. I also argued that without task management and workflows built in, our app would only provide diminished value and leave users wanting. At the end of the day, users need tools to help them get work done.
The logic landed, but the technical foundation was still shaky and no extra budget or staff was available. The redesign was rejected.
“Without the intelligence to do the work, we were building a ticketing system in nicer clothes.”
The pitch, lo-fi concept wires
Outcome
The service went from a standing start to a line advisors adopted at scale.
▲833%
Subscriber growth, post-launch
▲80%
Team growth, post-launch
▲220%
Plans delivered/month, post-launch
▼57%
Plans per advisor/month, post-launch
The platform digitized and unified operations for a new LPL business unit, enabling it to scale from ~75 advisors at launch in mid-2023 to ~700 by 2025. It also enabled leadership to integrate additional services (Tax Planning, Estate Planning, Advanced Planning, and Custom Portfolio Construction) into the Planning Services platform.
What was still unresolved
Planning Services offers delegated support, but there's real work on the advisor's part: gathering client data, structuring their planning offering, and delivering and updating plans. Many advisors entered the program unprepared to do the work and unwilling to do some of it on a timely basis.
“You can't just drink a smoothie and get in shape.”
For internal planners, the operational picture was equally unresolved. Delivery teams built their own processes independently resulting in no end-to-end visibility, no shared status vocabulary, and wildly disparate efficiencies across the LOBs.
Product Management also started receiving signal that our subscription model was too rigid with a growing number of advisors accumulating unused credits rather than engaging.
Closing those gaps (and others) became my focus for the rest of my tenure on Planning Services. That work started with mapping all five planning services so leadership could see the differences between them and decide on the right changes.