Front end engineer André Morgan pulls back the curtains on his team’s approach to building a platform that offers a delightful client experience.
Front end engineer André Morgan pulls back the curtains on his team’s approach to building a platform that offers a delightful client experience.
by André Morgan
The work of building and maintaining the Ethic platform is an ongoing process led by our dedicated team of engineers. However, we don’t often unpack just how that team works to deliver an exceptional product that supports a personalized, efficient, and delightful client journey for both advisors and investors. This week, front-end engineer André Morgan weighs in on the challenges and opportunities inherent in putting the client experience first when building our platform.
Some key takeaways from our chat with André:
- Balancing Developer and Client Experience: Prioritizing developer experience is crucial as it directly impacts the quality and speed of delivering features to clients. Ensuring alignment across teams on the value of this helps maintain a sustainable and consistent workflow.
- Intentional Time Investment: The key to creating a strong product offering lies in balancing immediate opportunities with the need to invest time in strong technical foundations. This requires intentional planning and a culture that respects engineering concerns.
- Complexity in Simplification: Translating complex internal systems into a user-friendly platform without losing sophistication is a significant challenge. By keeping the focus on listening to clients and collaborating meaningfully, we can create a personalized and impactful investing experience.
What are the biggest challenges you’ve found in putting the client experience first?
As a developer, I can say that client experience has some friendly competition: developer experience. To start, developer experience has to do with the efficiency and effectiveness of factors in the software development arena like code comprehension, code scalability, code contribution workflows and feature specs, to name a few. Good developer experience serves client experience in that it delivers quality features to our clients faster (and sanity to our engineers!). Developer experience is the yin to the client experience yang, which also means that when there’s bad developer experience, the negative effects on client experience really do snowball.
While the benefits of investing in developer experience can be an easy sell, the challenge arises from the fact that good developer experience often requires upfront time investment without clear upfront results. We’ve got opportunities at our doorstep and a strong team that can pull off just about anything. With all this excitement, balancing seizing the moment and investing time into building strong technical foundations takes a lot of intentionality. This is a challenge, but a really satisfying one to take on at Ethic.
How do you approach this challenge?
I think that overcoming the often challenging clash of client experience and developer experience involves these two things:
- Alignment across teams on the value of developer experience toward serving client experience. We need to all appreciate how this helps us move quickly at a sustainable level of consistency.
- Alignment on how to maintain a healthy balance between a quick turnaround and investing time in developer experience.
If we’re intentional about keeping developer experience a top priority on our product roadmap, we’ll be fine. Thankfully our team has a culture where engineering concerns are treated with a high level of respect, so I'm confident that we’ll keep this challenge in check.
With all these learnings in mind, what’s next? What are you excited about?
In framing what I'm most excited about, I sort of have to sneak in another challenge callout. Our internal systems that enable what we do are extremely complex. With that complexity comes the challenge of translating the relevant controls, activities, and results of these systems to clients in a way that feels easy to use while not losing sophistication.
Our product offering is unique. There are many different avenues for personalized and impactful investing that we support through one platform. We’re on a pretty uncharted path here so there aren’t any direct references out there for us or our clients on how to deliver the ideal product. It takes a lot of focus, listening, and deep collaborative work to figure out what’s important to our clients and how to package and then build those elements.
But one real reward as we navigate this new path is that we get to witness advisors and investors become more and more empowered through a personalized experience. Although very hard, this is really meaningful and fulfilling work, and I'm very excited to be involved.
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