UX and Product Design, Product Strategy, Brand Strategy

Alphakinetic's Glide: opening a niche, expert tool to a mass market

I transformed the niche, hyper-complex portfolio management solution Glide and opened it up to a broad user base of decision makers.

The challenge

With Glide, London-based fintech Alphakinetic had created a best-in-class portfolio manager with extensive functionality, but the product remained niche. While power-users loved it, decision makers found Glide overly complex and relied on a few experts to manually generate a constant stream of reports containing a snapshot of the data and insights they needed.

As a result, Alphakinetic struggled to demonstrate the value of its solution and grow their user base.

My approach

Alphakinetic hired me to create a reporting function for CFOs and decision makers. However, extensive research and iterative co-creation with users revealed, they simply needed a tool to quickly assess the health of their portfolio, not detailed reporting. They sought clarity with the option to delve deeper only when necessary, requiring both simplicity and a high level of customisation.

As a result I drastically simplified the interface and introduced a customisable information layer, giving users live data, key stats, and action items at one glance.

Recognising the need to respect expert users who had spent months and years mastering the tool and had built their own workflows – including Excel and python integrations – I introduced an expert mode. This retained the advanced features for pro users while encouraging less-savvy users to explore the platform’s capabilities.

The outcome

The changes significantly grew Glide’s user base, drove usage and satisfaction, and ultimately led to Alphakinetic being acquired by Virtus Partners.