A full redesign introducing goal tracking and emergency fund creation features to Empower's cash account, turning a passive holding account into something users actively use.
Personal Cash was Empower's least-engaged product. User research surfaced a startling statistic: about half of users who opened a Cash account ever successfully deposited money into it. Half the funnel evaporated after account creation.
Our assumption was that gap was a motivation problem, and so we went after the reasons people keep money in their accounts.
Along with restructuring the deposit flow, we proposed reframing the account to focus around what people were ACTUALLY saving for.
Estimated impact. We framed success around the funnel gap we could already measure, not vanity metrics:
Competitive analysis. I audited how comparable fintech products handled goal tracking and savings, collecting UI patterns across Monzo, Chase, Citibank, Wealthfront, and Ally to ground our ideation in what already worked in the market.
Requirements definition. Working closely with the PM and decision-making team, I translated the research and business hypothesis into validated product requirements for goal creation and emergency fund tracking.
Research-led design. Empower's User Research team ran the initial testing, and their findings directly shaped the design. The most consequential insight: asking users how much they wanted to deposit at the very beginning of onboarding, rather than after account setup, improved both account creation completion and deposit success rates.
Design system alignment. I refined the UI to match Empower's latest design system, so the new flows felt native rather than bolted on.
Funnel optimization. I mapped the different entry points into Personal Cash and redesigned each funnel around the early-deposit-ask insight and the new goal features.
Handoff. I partnered with the mobile and web dev teams to translate final designs and requirements into buildable specs.
Two product managers cycled through this project. The first left the company roughly halfway through, and for about three months there was no PM at all. During that gap, I stepped into much of the PM function: communicating directly with the UX writer, business analyst, and dev teams, defining and validating requirements, and catching handoff issues before they became blockers. When the second PM came on, I used my accumulated subject matter knowledge to bring them up to speed while development was still in motion.
A late addition: Emergency Fund. Midway through, our CEO pushed to fold Empower’s existing Emergency Fund feature into Personal Cash. My PM and I were wary at first. It meant more scope, a delayed launch, and tracking down the feature’s original owners to plan the transition.
Rather than bolt it on, I added Emergency Fund as a default option in goal creation, next to goals like a wedding or a vacation. On the surface it looked like any other goal, but it worked differently underneath.
A regular goal only tracked money sitting in Personal Cash, so people could deposit to it or withdraw from it. An Emergency Fund could also count money in their other banks, pulled in from linked accounts. Empower could show that money, but couldn’t move it, so deposit and withdraw didn’t make sense there.
Thus, I designed a separate Emergency Fund flow built around that difference, and used an existing icon from the design system to keep it familiar. People started from the same place as any other goal, and the screens never offered actions their money couldn’t support.
v1.0 of the redesigned Empower Personal Cash:
As the sole designer, I translated that direction into web and mobile flows and worked with engineering through handoff. When the project went roughly three months without a PM, I also helped clarify requirements, resolve open questions, and preserve the reasoning behind our decisions as the team changed.
In addition, the goal-tracking framework became an internal reference for exploring the concept of goals across other Empower products. That was a meaningful extension of the project’s influence, although I don’t have post-launch metrics confirming an increase in funded accounts or repeat deposits.
Personal Cash expanded my ownership beyond design: I helped define requirements and kept web and mobile work moving through a 3 month PM gap. The goal-tracking work also informed broader product exploration at Empower. While its business impact remains yet to be verified as it just went live, the ideal next step I'd take would be to test whether connecting savings to a goal actually helped more customers fund their accounts.