Asset Management

Managed Pricing Programs are collections of grain transactions from farmers managed by their Grain Market Advisor. The Grain Market Advisor makes trading decisions for the entire program by calling the Indigo Hedge Desk. The Indigo Hedge desk executes and manages the GMA’s trade decisions per program. The majority of the digital experience is for the Indigo Hedge desk.

Project Scope

This project builds on a scrappy developer tool to replace it and add functionality for the Indigo Hedge desk to manage programs.
The project was a massive body of work, including creation, management, and read-only views for multiple user groups and native app experiences.
Future iterations extend creation functionality to external customers and marketing pages to promote programs for farmers to self-enroll.

My Role

Partnered with the Global Head of Marketplace and Head of Global Markets to align design with product goals and user needs.
Established a tight relationship with Hedge Desk users to ensure alignment at every step of the project. Responsible for the entire design process, from wireframing to final execution and iteration.
Sole UX designer on a scrum team consisting of 4-5 developers. Actively participated in weekly team lead meetings with the Product Manager and Tech Lead.

Problem Statement

Indigo Hedge desk users need a system to facilitate Managed Pricing Programs that support all program functionality, including customized trading capabilities. Grain Marketing Advisors and their farmer customers need to be able to view up-to-date pricing information on their assets.

Design Process

First Iteration

MVP

The MPP tracker was accessible to the hedge desk users in a development environment that was not production-quality in terms of security and baseline infrastructure.

Unstable Environment

Managed Pricing Programs

The first iteration of Managed Pricing Programs was a large-scale effort to move asset coordination out of Excel sheets into a software system. The aim was to tackle as much as possible at once to create a system of truth. This effort included creating programs, enrolling farmers in those programs, and managing trades for the programs. Enrollments had additional levels of actions, such as price out and roll.

First Iteration

Workflows

Create Programs

Creating programs and enrolling farmers in those programs is a core workflow of the MPP system that was implemented with this work. Those programs have many states and statuses throughout their lifecycle. It was imperative to this work to understand what user group was responsible for what actions inside and outside the software workflow.

Execute Recommendations

Recommendation creation is a core workflow in the MPP process. In this workflow, the Advisor calls the Hedge Desk to make a recommendation or trade request for the program. The Hedge Desk records that recommendation in the Indigo system and executes an official trade on the exchange through our third party hedging software. To create a system of truth for these programs, we had to account for all the systems in play, whether that was Indigo software or offline communication channels.

Use cases

When programs are created, they have a custom enrollment and pricing window that creates many use cases to manage. These windows affect when farmers can set pricing on their enrollments in the program and when advisors can start and end pricing the program for all the farmers enrolled.

Designs

Hedge Desk User - Internal User

Business User - Grain Marketing Advisor

Consumer View - Mobile

Mobile views on native apps and mobile web are for the farmer user type, who has a limited set of program information.

Here is a prototype showcasing the recommendation management and creation process.

Prototype

Future Explorations

In future iterations, the Advisor and Farmer would have a more actions available in an interface. The responsibility of shopping, selling programs, and enrolling farmers into programs would be moved from an Indigo Admin job to a self-service digital interface.