STUDENT LOAN HERO

As the first in-house designer at SLH, I partnered to help build our product design and innovation practices, along with shipping optimizations and feature work.

Overview

Founded in 2012, Student Loan Hero (SLH) began as a web platform of content, tools, and resources intended to help borrowers manage student loan debt. A bootstrapped endeavor, by the time I joined in 2017, the company had grown into other financial verticals, with over 80 employees, and more than a million unique monthly visitors.

My ROLE

Joining SLH was a unique opportunity to help build a design practice from scratch in an existing growth-stage company. In partnership with a fantastic PM counterpart, we began by auditing our baseline experience to identify and prioritize a series of high-value focus areas while building our team with another PM, other designers, researchers, and a UX writer.

As we solidified our team and optimized our processes, near term strategies, and longer-term roadmap, my scope expanded to lead a company-wide innovation workstream in collaboration with our CEO to uncover new growth opportunities.

IMPACT

Championed the playbooks - SLH was a huge opportunity to take my experience in startups and combine that scrappiness with the playbooks for organization design, discovery, prioritization, experimentation, and innovation.

Drove KPI’s with low-cost experiments - I championed an efficient, evidence-based process and we built a foundational understanding of our customers that allowed us to ship lots of winning experiments that drove revenue growth for the business - and a better experience for our visitors.

Helped make the company more customer-centric - While leading our innovation practice, I'm proud that I helped to educate our organization through a series of workshops about human-centered approaches and how each function could apply HCD methods to their respective areas. Plus, the workshop series output led to a company-wide, inclusive backlog of testable innovations, some of which were pursued before our acquisition by Lending Tree.

TAKEAWAYS

Create an engine for decision making - Our team was super sharp. We aligned to very similar processes for arriving at decisions from mature companies like Intuit, Facebook, Expedia Group, and CreditKarma. We all knew that data should drive the decisions and how best to use that data within our functions to make the most significant impact. That degree of alignment helped us be efficient and made work fun!

Build a people-first practice - SLH invested heavily in their people practice, culture, and employee health, and it showed. Our hiring practices, evaluation practices, and feedback circles were top-notch, and it showed - I'd never seen such an enthusiastic group of employees. Mechanisms for collecting feedback, facilitating 1:1's, comp, managing time, and other practices I adopted and carried forward with me to SoFi and into my consulting practices with clear continuing impact for my teams, helping increase employee satisfaction and retention.

Remoteness is leverage - SLH was remote before remote was en vogue in our covid world. While a remoteness had some gaps, like being a bit more challenging to host workshops, the benefits of building a team with expanded geography was clear. Not only was it positive for employees, but it expanded the talent pool, helped teams stay focused, lowered company costs, and allowed employees to find real work-life balance. To help close some of the distance gaps, the company invested heavily in the people practice and we would meet as a company for a week every other quarter in a different location, and teams had travel budgets to work together if needed - which was great! I never expected to fly to Saint Louis for a few days of research synthesis!