Defining an MVP for financial literacy
Exploring how Maji could expand beyond financial wellbeing tools by introducing a scalable financial education experience.
SaaS
B2B
MVP
Role
Lead Product designer
Timeline
1 week
My direct contribution
Collaborate with founder and PM, End-to-end design and prototype
Team size
1 Designer, 1 PM, 2 Founders
Project Background
Maji is a financial wellbeing platform that helps employees improve their financial health through coaching, tools, and personalised guidance. While the platform included Maji Academy, educational content wasn't a core part of the product and was limited in scope.
An opportunity emerged when People's Pension was looking for a partner that could provide comprehensive financial education as part of its offering. They needed educational content delivered in multiple format to support employees with different learning preferences. As part of a competitive bid, we had one week to create an MVP that demonstrated how Maji could expand its financial education offering to meet People's Pension's requirements.
With just one week, our objective wasn't to build a production-ready solution—it was to define and prototype a compelling MVP that showcased Maji's vision, addressed People's Pension's requirements, and positioned us as a credible partner during the evaluation process.
Challenge
How might we design a compelling MVP for a holistic financial education experience within one week, demonstrating enough value to compete for a strategic partnership without overbuilding the solution?
Kick-off Workshop
Ideas generated
Prioritising features
Next we started prioritising features to allow efficient allocation of both the team’s time and resources and adopt a goal-first approach. Several ideas emerged such as personalised learning paths, community, AI recommendations, and social learning but we found that these would require additional validation.
Rather than trying to compete with mature learning platforms, we intentionally narrowed the scope to a focused MVP that demonstrated the core value proposition within the one-week deadline.
Affinity map
Information architecture
With the MVP priorities established, I took ownership of designing the information architecture, organising the platform's content into intuitive categories.
Low fidelty designs review
Designed with just enough detail to validate structure and content hierarchy, allowing the team to provide quick feedback and iterate rapidly before moving into high-fidelity designs.
Local design system
To maximise speed and consistency, I created a lightweight local design system containing reusable components
Final designs and prototype
To make the prototype feel authentic, I integrated the new financial education experience with both the People's Pension website and Maji's existing product ecosystem.
Outcome
Although our proposal reached the final three contenders, Maji was ultimately not selected for the partnership.
Through the feedback and competitive review, we identified several areas where more mature competitors had an advantage:
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A comprehensive content ecosystem with structured learning pathways rather than standalone educational resources.
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Well-documented content strategy, clearly explaining how educational content was created, reviewed, and maintained over time.
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Action-oriented learning journeys that seamlessly guided users from education to the next financial action.
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Professionally produced branded video content, which created a more polished and credible learning experience.
While Maji already offered coaching journeys and financial wellbeing tools, the connection between learning content and personalised actions wasn't yet as cohesive. The prototype demonstrated the vision, but the end-to-end education experience required further refinement to compete with established financial education platforms.
Key learnings
A compelling product vision must be supported by:
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A scalable content strategy.
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A cohesive end-to-end learning ecosystem.
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High-quality educational assets.
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Clear pathways from learning to action.
Although we didn't win the bid, the sprint helped clarify the capabilities Maji would need to invest in if financial literacy became a strategic product direction. It also demonstrated the value of using an MVP to rapidly explore new opportunities and uncover gaps before making larger product investments.
Next project
Reimagining the onboarding experience
A redesign that increased completion from 0% to 8%, increased account linking by 100%, and led 4 users to book their first coaching session.
