Product Strategy for a Community Finance Platform

During my time at Common Good, I led a six-month strategic initiative to establish user-centered processes, launch a mobile payment app, and create a research-backed strategy for sustainable growth. This work provided the organization with clear priorities and foundations for future design that aligned with their user needs and organizational mission.

Common Good operates a non-profit payment system where members and businesses contribute to a shared community fund. Members exchange credits from this fund for local goods and services, and democratically vote on how to reinvest the pooled money into community projects. This cooperative model aims to shift financial decision-making from large institutions to communities.

Despite a loyal core membership, Common Good struggled with growth and retention due to the complexity of their system and poor usability. With a small team of two engineers and limited resources, we needed to strategically prioritize improvements to maximize impact.

The initial product strategy was centered on growth through new feature development. We planned to replace an existing Point of Sale mobile app while also introducing peer-to-peer payment functions modeled after Venmo and PayPal.

At the same time, there were pressing needs to update visual design and improve the member sign-up and onboarding processes, which asked for sensitive financial information like a Social Security Number before members had experienced any value. Should we immediately fix onboarding, or did the core product need more attention to support the existing user base first?

To contextualize competing priorities, I interviewed the founder and outreach manager, reviewed current member feedback, and analyzed results from a membership survey of 80 respondents. I synthesized this preliminary research into key findings:

These insights led me to question the value of building a growth strategy around new features, especially given early signs of misalignment between the planned features and current user needs.

First, though, we needed to establish a structured process for delivering and validating improvements that could support another strategic approach.

One strategic challenge was understanding the Common Good system as a whole. The existing application had a wide array of features that had accumulated over time. Many had never been properly tested with users, and their impact was not being measured.

I created a series of diagrams to illustrate the member journey and system touchpoints, and identified metrics that would connect our work to the organizational goals of membership growth and retention, and the mission of positive community impact through democratically decided upon funded projects.

These artifacts highlighted that local businesses were a key touchpoint where members connected with Common Good through in-person conversations and ambient awareness. Funded community projects served a similar role, fulfilling our mission of community impact while organically promoting growth through word-of-mouth.

With so many ideas in play, it was hard to move forward — priorities kept getting combined and it felt like everything needed fixing at once. Before committing engineering time to any feature, I sketched and paper-prototyped the core flows separately for individual and business accounts, breaking each one down into discrete interaction steps: scan, charge, pay, confirm, undo.

This gave the team a concrete, shared reference for what was actually in scope for each account type, and let non-designers react to and critique specific steps instead of the system as a whole. It's also what let us stop trying to fix everything and start shipping a defined MVP.

Gaining clarity on priorities, I led staff trainings to promote an iterative, user-centered design process, and instituted a structured release plan informed by agile and lean methodologies that was adopted with buy-in from the team.

Using this framework, we were able to focus on a core set of features for Point of Sale and peer-to-peer payments. We would release this functionality as an MVP while gathering more user feedback via surveys, and prototyping and testing.

To support the launch, I facilitated a collaborative branding workshop with stakeholders from outreach, member support, engineering, and leadership, producing a moodboard and brand style guide that gave the team a consistent visual foundation to build on.

Building on the brand foundations, I developed a design system in Figma and the application codebase following Atomic Design principles. Accessibility drove key design decisions, as both our mission and older user base required inclusive solutions. I built to WCAG AA-AAA standards, starting with larger base fonts and interaction elements that could scale down while maintaining accessibility as features grew more complex.

The design system and clearly defined scope allowed us to quickly build and release a visually cohesive MVP with core payment functionality. We announced the release with a user survey and recruitment for user testing, which would inform our next steps.

The iterative process we'd established allowed us to validate our core features and their design while gathering important user research. Through moderated user tests, we learned business users were satisfied with simpler functionality and wanted familiar Point of Sale interfaces. This helped us deprioritize planned features and focus our development efforts.

The combined research reinforced user needs we'd seen earlier: people wanted to engage with their communities and make meaningful local impact, and needed straightforward search tools to discover Common Good businesses. Meanwhile, businesses needed support in promoting Common Good to their customers. In its current stage, our app focused on the MVP functionality of making transactions and keeping a record of transactions and balance.

Our research consistently highlighted the importance of local connections. Through discussions with the founder, I learned that community organizing had been central to Common Good's past successes — combining local promotion, media engagement, and both in-person and digital activities.

Building on my earlier member journey funnel, I created journey maps showing how existing community connections could drive organic growth:

The Common Good model thrived through face-to-face conversations, where people shared the mission and answered logistical questions in real-time. This made businesses essential as natural meeting points for education and engagement. Physical promo materials could support these conversations and direct people to digital sign-up.

By bridging physical and digital spaces, and emphasizing the funding of local projects, we could create a growth strategy that aligned with both user needs and Common Good's mission.

Based on these learnings, I redesigned the sign-up flow to foreground local communities. The new design introduced tiered membership levels, allowing users to explore and engage with their community before sharing sensitive financial information. This approach reduced friction while creating space for users to build understanding and trust.

Because the core interaction steps were already mapped and built as part of the first release, this redesign could add search and community on top of them, rather than risk replacing or breaking what already worked.

As I concluded my time with Common Good, I left them with:

• A research-backed strategy connecting in-person and digital interactions
• A successful lean product launch validating core features
• Clear priorities aligned with both user needs and organizational mission

Through research, iterative design, and a renewed focus on community, we created a path forward that could better serve members, businesses, and the organization's mission.