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| Role | Senior Product Designer |
|---|---|
| Company | Risk Ledger |
| Focus | Product-led growth, onboarding, activation, B2B SaaS |
| Tools | Figma, FigJam, Metabase, Mixpanel, LogRocket, Linear, Cursor |
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The first value moment: seeing a real supplier assessment, not an empty trial workspace.
Risk Ledger is a third-party risk management platform. Clients use it to assess and monitor their suppliers. Suppliers use it to complete security assessments for those clients.
That creates a valuable growth opportunity: many suppliers already understand the product because they use it to respond to assessments. The business question was whether some of those suppliers could be converted into paying clients themselves.
The self-serve trial was meant to test that motion. But after relaunch, the signal was unclear. Users were starting trials, but the experience was not producing meaningful pipeline. The question became: was supplier demand weak, or was the product blocking users before they reached value?
I led the design discovery and activation strategy to answer that.
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| PLG | Product-led growth, where users experience value in the product before speaking to sales. |
|---|---|
| Supplier-side user | A supplier completing an assessment for one of their clients. |
| Client-side user | A company using Risk Ledger to assess and monitor its own suppliers. |
| Supplier conversion | Turning an engaged supplier-side user into a client-side buyer. |
| Shared profile | A supplier profile link that lets someone view or access a supplier’s existing assessment. In this trial, users arriving this way were already connected before they landed. |
| Auto-connect | Automatically connecting a trial user to a supplier profile so they can see value immediately. |
| Managed profile | A supplier profile already available in the platform that can be used to show the client-side experience without waiting for a real supplier to accept a request. |
| First value moment | The moment a user sees something useful enough to understand the product’s value. In this case, a real supplier assessment. |
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The old trial journey asked users to do too much before they understood why the product mattered.
A supplier could finish an assessment, become curious about the client side of Risk Ledger, start a trial, and land in a mostly empty workspace. To see anything meaningful — supplier scores, completed assessments, risks, and domain breakdowns — they first had to connect to a supplier.
The main action, “Add supplier”, took them into a workflow designed for real client operations: adding contact details, classifying the supplier, setting scope, and sending a connection request. That flow made sense for a paying client, but it was the wrong first step for someone simply trying to understand the product.
In some sessions, users completed the flow and still ended on an acceptance wall. They had done the work, but they still had no assessment to view.