End-to-end Finance user journey map
Visualizing the holistic user journey between various Finance tasks, tools, and teams to enable a more human-centered future
My role
Design Manager (influencing prioritization, overseeing strategy and partner relationships, ensuring design quality)
Timeline
September 2024–December 2025 (3 months)
I worked with…
1 Service Designer, 1 Visual Designer, 2 Product partners, multiple Product, Business, and Tech stakeholders
Overview
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a platform tool that a business uses to manage its financials and other core business activities. Given the aging nature of Capital One’s current ERP application, the company has been working towards implementing a modern ERP. One of the first steps in defining this multi-year strategy was to document our current end-to-end state.
As we looked through existing research, we noticed that accountants, financial analysts, and others were leveraging many different platforms to complete their various jobs to be done. Across journal entry creation and reconciliation, through reporting and forecasting - there was no current source of truth documenting the holistic Finance user experience.
The challenge
Before we could think about designing for a future post-ERP modernization, we first needed to understand where we are today - what is the end-to-end Finance lifecycle? What are our users’ current pain points? Where are there currently areas of opportunity? How might we align our partners and leaders to a single point of view so that we can design a more human-centered future for Finance associates?
As our team and our leaders were beginning to think about where we might want to go as a Finance organization, it was important to bring a more user-centered approach to enable and drive the conversation.
Our goals
Our intended outcome was to create a robust understanding of the current end-to-end Finance user journey. In doing so, we needed to develop and document a consistent source of truth for partners and leaders to align to and have conversations around. This source of truth was meant to highlight opportunities for closing gaps, inefficiencies, and risks.
Document a user-centered source of truth for the current state Finance experience
Surface pain points, archetypes, and the highest leverage areas of opportunity within each platform and tool.
Drive conversations and alignment with leadership to influence what the future state user experience should look like post ERP-modernization.
Discovery
To start, we collected past research and existing documents that helped us understand various Finance user processes at a high level. Where documentation lacked, we pulled in subject matter experts within various teams to learn more.
Stakeholder workshops
From our learnings in discovery we were able to build a preliminary mapping, which we used to guide a series of workshops with Product and Tech stakeholders. The workshops were aimed at continuing to fill in the blanks of our research and starting to visualize the current state Finance user journey.
Visual design & interaction
We documented our understanding of the Finance user journey in a comprehensive mapping. Today the mapping serves as a source of truth, leveraging existing documents, past research, and several conversations with subject matter experts and key stakeholders. We also worked to fold in micro-interactions that help our partners understand Finance user archetypes as well as high leverage areas of opportunity.
Strategic insights
In addition to the mapping, we provided several strategic insights and recommendations that span across the Finance user journey.
Disjointed tools
Across the ecosystem, there are many similar tools that users need to access to complete a task, driving inefficiencies.
Different experiences cause friction points. Consider building solutions that aggregate similar processes under one platform or tooling.
Data lineage
As financial data passes through systems, users have difficulties understanding the data’s context.
Improve controls and systems to establish and track data context throughout the organization.
Manual work
Manual tasks, driven by systematic issues, still take up user time; tracking of manual tasks is not standardized and poses a risk.
Discover tooling that enables users to track their most important tasks and build automation upstream.
Audit SOPs
There are many undocumented or poorly documented user processes that need to be audited prior to modernization.
Align with Process Engineering teams to define problem statements and key areas of research; expand user archetypes and standardize processes.
Misaligned roles
User skills are not matched to the ecosystem they are working in, resulting in onboarding pains and attrition.
Roles are not aligned to talent. Conduct a comprehensive audit; support, train, transition, and re-organize teams.
Beth, VP of Product Management
“This is such important foundational work for all future opportunities.”
Impact
Establishing a source of truth
Our mapping has become the source of truth, and is now helping onboard Senior leadership within Finance Product management
Prioritizing work
A new cross-functional working group was established specifically to prioritize and address the findings around data lineage, one of our strategic insights
Driving conversations
We have led several subsequent sessions to continue improving our mapping, as well as to socialize our findings and hypothesize about the future state
Interested in more?
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