Building the advisor experience around advisors’ time

SHOOK Research builds the Forbes rankings of top financial advisors. Advisors apply and complete a detailed survey every year, so the number of completed surveys is the business’s top-line lever.

I joined as the company changed ownership. The advisor platform was being rebuilt with an outside development partner, and I took on the advisor’s side of that work.

The existing portal was showing its age, and it asked advisors to re-enter information we already had, or that anyone could look up. Their feedback arrived one email at a time in a shared inbox, so there was no single picture of what mattered most. The rebuild was a chance to design around what advisors actually experience.

• Took on the advisor’s side of the rebuild: translated business asks into product requirements and advocated for the user in scoping and prioritization with the dev partner.
• Turned five due-diligence trips into discovery. Across roughly fifty advisors I added questions about how they actually experienced the portal and the survey, alongside what each trip was booked for.
• Our shared support inbox held about 60,000 emails: a decade of advisor feedback. I connected it to Claude, worked through a sample, bucketed every piece of feedback into categories and ranked them by how often they came up, so the roadmap could follow what advisors raised most.
• Discovery showed younger advisors wanted something faster and more consolidated. On my own initiative I ran internal focus groups and competitor research, then pitched, scoped and demoed a companion app.

Two requests kept surfacing in the trips, at the top of the inbox categories, and from our own staff.

Just before launch, the flagship event the app was built around was cancelled, and the launch moment went with it.

I didn’t push the app harder. I re-read the business: survey volume was still the lever, and advisor trust was now the constraint. The relaunch had to ask less of advisors and make the most of their time.

• Carry over historical data even though it added field-mapping engineering cost. Making returning advisors retype last year’s answers would cost more in drop-off.
• Less friction, not fewer questions. We are adding questions where they earn their place, so the win is removing the ones we can answer ourselves and validating the rest as they are typed, instead of in review.
• Confirm the terms. I read the terms for regulator data access and confirmed our use as a ranking business was already permitted, which opened the same route for RIA and insurance records.
• Move verification upstream. Checks that used to happen weeks later in manual review can happen while the advisor is still in the form, which turns a follow-up email into a question asked at the right moment.
• Keep the app on hold rather than retire it. It depends on the event, so it waits until partner events resume.

Some of my most useful work changed what got built before it was built.

The friction-reduction plan is in the build for the relaunch: returning advisors start from last year’s answers, public fields are verified as they are entered, and regulator checks that used to happen weeks later happen while the advisor is still in the form.

The number I’ll judge it by is survey completion rate at relaunch, compared with last cycle.

Instrument the survey funnel step by step so the next round of cuts is driven by drop-off data, not interviews alone. Then revisit the app once partner events resume, using the discovery we already have.