Ditching Spreadsheets to Make Financial
Plans People Can Actually Follow

When Walkr's founder reached out, the framing was deceptively simple: we need an app. It took about thirty minutes to understand the real problem was two problems wearing the same coat.

The client side: specialists built comprehensive plans — but delivered them as spreadsheets. Complex, interconnected, anxiety-inducing spreadsheets. Clients were calling in confused, disengaged, and quietly abandoning their goals. Not because they didn't want financial freedom. Because the way the plan was presented made it impossible to understand where they were, where they were going, or what they needed to do next.

The specialist side: every update was manual. Every new piece of financial data required opening a spreadsheet, finding the right cell, editing by hand. Time that should have gone into actual guidance was going into data administration. When a specialist left, the institutional knowledge walked out with them.

This was not a solo act. The thinking was theirs. The translation was mine.

The project started with a Money Heist-themed 3-day design sprint — deliberately theatrical, deliberately energetic. I wanted the team to come into the room already thinking like a heist crew, not like a committee.

That choice mattered more than it might seem. The Walkr team had no design background. Founders and financial specialists expected to sketch interfaces is a fragile situation unless the framing explicitly gives them permission to be imperfect, fast, and generative. The theme did that work before the first exercise began.

Day 1 mapped the operation end to end. Three “How Might We” challenges surfaced from affinity mapping: standardise formulary completion, simplify advisor training, help clients understand their financial plan. These became the spine of everything that followed.

Day 2: stolen inspirations. Fabulous — a habit-building app — sparked the key reframe: what if a financial plan felt less like a dashboard and more like a daily habit loop? That became the emotional north star for the client-facing design.

Day 3: democratic direction. Sketches, dot-voting, convergence. The team built it together, so the team believed in it.

The early prototypes worked. Technically. The dashboards surfaced the right numbers, the flows were logical, the data was organized. My developer partner verified the math was solid. The founder approved the architecture.

Then the founder said something that stopped the project cold.

“Something is missing. It doesn't feel like a relationship.”

He was right. The dashboards were functional but impersonal — they treated the financial plan as a data system to manage, not a life goal to pursue. The plan was there, but the person wasn't.

The honest answer was that making it personal at the depth he was describing was not achievable within the MVP constraints. I made a deliberate, documented call: prioritise structural clarity and goal-orientation now, layer the relational depth in a future iteration.

That decision produced the “Projeto de Vida” (Life Project) framing — moving the primary dashboard away from portfolio management and toward personal milestone tracking. It wasn't the full emotional arc the founder wanted. But it was the honest next step that could actually ship.

The MVP shipped as seven distinct dashboards across two user types. The UI runs on a near-black background with teal/cyan accent hierarchy — a deliberate brand and behavioral call. Financial apps that feel clinical inherit the anxiety of spreadsheets. The dark environment signals this is a considered space, not a utility.

For clients: Projeto de Vida (goal-progress, the primary view), Carteira de Investimentos (portfolio), Gestão de Riscos (risk), Saúde Financeira (health), and Marketplace / Sugestões.

For specialists: a segmented Formulário that mirrors the natural rhythm of a consultation — not a database schema — and the Fluxo Financeiro overview.

Alongside the app, I produced a complete service map: the full client-specialist-B2C journey visualized end to end. Not a client deliverable — operational infrastructure for the Walkr team, a shared reference that made onboarding new specialists possible without the knowledge living only in the founder's head.

If clients could see their financial plan as a goal-progress story rather than a spreadsheet → Then they would stop calling in confused and start trusting the process → As a result, 30% drop in confused client support calls, post-launch.

If the specialist data collection flow mirrored their natural consultation rhythm instead of a database schema → Then data entry would require less switching mid-conversation → As a result, manual update time dropped 40%.

If institutional knowledge was embedded into the platform structure — flow logic, module organization, form sequence — rather than living in senior specialists' heads → Then the ramp-up curve for new hires would compress → As a result, onboarding dropped from 2 weeks to 1 week.

What I don't know: The metrics — 40% manual update reduction, 30% drop in confused calls, 1-week onboarding — were reported by the Walkr team post-launch. I was not embedded after launch, did not run the measurement, and cannot verify the methodology. They are the client's account of the impact, not independently validated data. I believe them, but I can't audit them.

What was left unbuilt: The founder was right about the missing relational layer. The MVP is goal-oriented but not relationship-oriented. That gap is real and worth naming. A second design pass (GWX) happened after my engagement ended. I was not involved and cannot speak to what changed.

What I'd do differently: I ran the sprint with the whole team as one group. The specialists and the founder had different mental models of the client relationship and papered over those differences in the group setting. I should have run separate discovery sessions before bringing everyone together.

What this project taught me: The most important thing you can do in a complex domain is spend time with the people inside it before designing anything. Not interviews. Time. The financial planning world runs on human trust. The design had to feel like it understood that weight. It did, mostly. That mostly is something I'm still working on.