While 90% can be achieved in Google Sheets, the crucial last 10% distinguishes CFOs and FP&A professionals as heroes in their companies. Abacum operates at the low margin of 10%.
How do we build an exceptional product in this very demanding domain? For us as designers, this really meant listening to our customers, co-creating with them, shipping often and unshipping even faster.
Comments
Collaboration is the biggest value proposition for Abacum. A couple of months of my dedicated work were invested in designing multiple proposals and models for annotations, comments, and task management.
My team's main focus was predominantly on tables, which posed a significant challenge (boy, were we wrong about the scope), yet our hard work turned into one of the most important parts of Abacum.
Comments origin and visibility level
One of the biggest challenges in comments is their relationship with origin and cells, especially when annotating a cell encompassing multiple sources. Roles and permissions vary for Finance, HR, and COO, impacting the source and reference.
My task was to collaborate closely with FP&A, DevOps, and Engineers to build a framework that would allow us to tailor different experiences depending on the context of the commented value.
Modeling
Speaking with multiple CFOs, there was something interesting in the way they think versus execute. Most of them like to think on paper, sketch the model in the form of a diagram, and map the critical values and variables.
This is one of many proposals we built to allow CFOs to create simple models and connect them to real data to test their hypotheses.
IMPACT
Sign a contract with one of the biggest clients and became the basis of the product.
Tables and Fomulas
Finance folks are great with numbers, and even better with formulas. Because of that, many traditional financial tools relied on FP&A's cognitive load instead of building more human-readable formulas that allow them to maintain and scale their variables and models.
One of the tasks I worked on was to make values and variables more human-readable and easier to reference.
Building design team and culture.
How to build pretty nice table system in Figma.
My favourite place to eat lunch in Barcelona.
A glimpse of my work and life. Thanks for reading.
Ivan Kunjasic, anno 2024