Summer 2022, New York, NY

Goldman Sachs - Portfolio Viewer

Overview: Led development of portfolio product for Portfolio Managers in the Asset Management Group.

Components: HTML, CSS, Digital Design, Graphic Design, Agile Framework

Tools: Figma, Confluence, Powerpoint, Jira, Goldman Sachs UI Toolkit

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Background

As part of my 10 week internship with Goldman Sachs, I worked with the private credit and portfolio management engineering teams to define and develop an internal application for portfolio managers that dynamically combines disparate databases with user customization to track and display metrics for funds and middle market companies.

 

Task

Create the next generation application to address portfolio managers’ needs to enable them to more efficiently find and recommend funds and middle market companies for clients.


Approach

From initial user interviews and data usage of current tools available to them, I determined that to make the best product for the users of the product – the Portfolio Managers across the Asset Management Group – the best and most efficient solution was to build a next generation product of the system they currently used. To dive in on the product requirements, I created specific interview questions and areas to understand more deeply and worked across Portfolio Management teams, including the Specialty Lending Group and the Business Development Company Management Team, to solicit broad based feedback and input.

Common feedback to be addressed in the next generation Portfolio Viewer included:

  • Need to eliminate the need to export data repeatedly to Excel in order to perform data manipulation

    • Benefit to be achieved: save time, facilitate data comparison across products and be able to answer client questions more readily

  • Create ability to perform graphical analysis in the current system with which users are already comfortable

    • Benefit to be achieved: avoid need to user to learn completely new system such that user adoption of the new features like graphical analysis enjoys high adoption rate

  • Enable method to view large amounts of data as doing so from a large spreadsheet is difficult and inefficient

    • Benefit to be achieved: higher usage and analysis across product sets for benefit of ultimate clients of firm

I shared feedback and learning with engineers and collaborated with them to best assess different approaches available to us to update the current software to meet user requirements.

To summarize:

Through this defining, managing and building the “Portfolio Viewer”, I became much more familiar with the Agile Framework and how best to lead a team. Leading daily standup meetings and learning how to operate sprints proved to be invaluable for us to consistently hit goals and make progress on this project.

Being responsible for spearheading interactions with different businesses groups at Goldman Sachs was very interesting for me as well. I had to adjust to each group’s specific needs and understand how they used a common product while defining the product with common attributes and improvements that would meet all users’ needs and be supported by a common product infrastructure. The result was that prioritizing product functionality and design requirements became a key driver of the project and assuring buy in from the user groups.

Using Jira, Confluence, and GitLab, my amazing team and I were able to make an innovative prototype product to help create an important part of the future of Portfolio Management.

Unfortunately, due to privacy reasons, I am unable to show you screenshots or the live demo itself…

If you would like to hear more about the general product development approach for this project, feel free to reach out!


 
 
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