Investors Alley
“Divcaster”
Investors Alley: Divcaster carousel content with slides.
The Investors Alley: Divcaster carousel is a rotating set of images with associated copy, rotation stops on keyboard focus on carousel tab controls, or hovering the mouse pointer over images. Use the tabs or the previous and next buttons to change the displayed slide.
Role
Genres
The Investors Alley brand has a unique approach to investing. Instead of guiding investors to build a portfolio solely with positions that they buy or sell, they focus on positions that produce the highest dividend yields. In the past, they conveyed this information to their website user base through online articles, email campaigns, and the occasional prospectus via PDF. To meet the needs of their users, they decided to build a responsive web app fueled by recognized financial industry APIs to provide up-to-the-minute market movements. To ensure their existing clientele would adopt this separate app, they also included a tutorial mode within the app.
The app was designed to be easy to use for their target audience and spoke to them using familiar investment vocabulary. The frontend of the app was developed using React, an open-source front-end JavaScript library for building user interfaces based on components. The backend was built using Next.js. These two technologies work well together, with one of their biggest selling points being that they only load content that changes instead of loading entire pages. This results in a snappy app experience without unsightly blank white pages while content loads in.
The app provides powerful graphing tools that are highly customizable to the user. The data visualizations are updated instantly when users add or remove positions. Additionally, users can chart what-if scenarios for positions they may or may not own, helping them make educated decisions about their portfolio.
My role on this digital product consisted of managing both their design and development teams throughout the production. As Technical Product Manager, I would set milestones, meet with the client to plan features, and build schedules. Some of the biggest challenges on this product for me were meeting with paid 3rd party API vendors to identify gaps in the datasets and how best to protect against them. With such vast sets of data to digest, I found it to be instrumental to build a rapport with each vendor, meeting with them as much as necessary. The entire app’s success hinged upon having accurate and timely data.