Improved risk management for a GRC SaaS app

Company was a SaaS business in the compliance space. There were 8 designers in the company and each designer worked in a smaller team focussing on different areas of the complex web app in the Governance, Risks & Compliance (GRC) domain. This project features the Risks area in the app. The whole design process from conceptualization to final delivery took 8 weeks. The team included product managers, engineering leads and the founders. I was the sole design owner responsible for end-to-end product design.

Business wanted this project to transcend the capabilities of the Risk module offered by the competitors and make this a key value proposition to enhance overall sales. The existing Risk module in the app had received numerous feedback on the difficulty in completing an assessment completely on the app and users had to rely on external tools to complete the process. The primary objective of the project was to address these issues.

From the time the project was allotted, I deep dove into competitor analysis on the Risks module and was collecting data from major GRC players in the field. Also extensive research was done on how our current customers do Risk assessment in their organization via interviews and going through documents they shared. One realization we had early on was that no two organizations did Risk assessment in the same way and it seemed harder to productize with this constraint. We realized there is a long way to go in this journey on improving the Risks module and hence had to prioritize what could be the most pressing changes we can do and draw out a plan for incremental improvements from there.

Starting with a process flow and then low fidelity wireframes were designed based on the flow. We brought in other stakeholders including the customer success team to give feedback on the solution early on. Finally high fidelity designs were worked on from there which had over 50 unique pages and drawers. The solution involved a dashboard which had a Risk matrix data visualization and that was one of the most fun parts of the exercise.

After the development was completed and the project was in QA phase, we conducted contextual inquiries with a few users (including the customers who helped in initial research) if this model of risk assessment will work in their organization. One focus was on the ease of understanding the processes for completing Risk assessment and other was general navigation of the module. It was overall positive and we released the feature. This feature helped in converting 90% of the qualified leads interested in the Risks module of the product into clients which was a big recognition.