Glassboard by Assure

The Challenge

Private investors managing Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) were buried in administrative work. Every deal required a maze of IRS documentation, investor communications, capital tracking, and legal coordination — all managed manually across spreadsheets and email threads. The time investors spent on paperwork was time they were not spending finding new deals or building relationships. Assure saw an opportunity to solve this, but no comparable platform existed. There was nothing to reference and nothing to benchmark against.

The Strategy

Before designing a single screen, I needed to understand a process I had never encountered. The CEO of Assure had decades of hands-on SPV experience. He was the system. My first goal was to externalize his mental model: what steps happened in what order, where the pain was concentrated, and what government regulation required versus what was simply ingrained habit. A series of working sessions produced the flow map that would drive every design decision that followed.

The constraint was real: regulatory requirements meant certain steps could not be removed from the process. The design challenge was making everything else as frictionless as possible.

The Execution

With the process mapped, I built a design system from the ground up: components, patterns, and a visual language that could scale across a complex multi-screen platform. The product covered five core areas: Dashboard, Investments, Deals, Network, and Payments. Each required its own information architecture while sharing a consistent design language across desktop and mobile.

I worked directly with front-end and back-end developers throughout, surfacing technical constraints early and adjusting designs before anything was built twice. The platform needed to handle IRS documentation, deal status tracking, investor invitations, capital commitments, fund reporting, and mobile access. Prototypes were built in UXPin and used for stakeholder walkthroughs and developer handoff.

The Results

Glassboard launched as the first platform of its kind in the SPV investing space. It became Assure's primary operating system for their full client portfolio of deals and continues to be used today. Without a comparable product to benchmark against, the measure of success was straightforward: investors could manage deals end-to-end on a single platform instead of across spreadsheets, email, and manual paperwork. That was the job to be done. Glassboard did it.