Designing Pocket CFO, an AI financial coach that turns a goal into a plan you can question
Challenge
Budgeting apps are good at telling you what you spent and bad at telling you what to do. They categorise the past and leave the decision to you. The questions that actually matter are forward-looking: if I take this job, how much sooner am I debt free, what would I need to earn to halve that timeline, is it better to clear this debt or start investing. Answering those properly needs someone who understands your full financial position, which usually means a financial advisor most people can't justify paying for.
Approach
I looked at the two ends of the market, the tracking apps and the advisory relationship, and worked out what each one gives you that the other doesn't. Trackers have your data but no view. Advisors have a view but need you to explain your data. The design had to hold both. I researched how debt payoff and goal-based savings products handle onboarding, since that's where a plan either becomes credible or collapses into guesswork, and I capped the product at two goals, clearing debt by a date and growing money by a date, because a plan with five competing goals stops being a plan.
Solution
Pocket CFO opens by asking what you're working towards, then builds the picture behind it: what you earn, what you owe, what kind of debt, at what rate, over what term, drawn from payslips and statements rather than manual entry. From there it produces a plan showing where you are against where you said you want to be. The part that makes it useful is the conversation on top. Because it already holds your context, you can interrogate the plan directly. Ask what salary you'd need to be debt free in eighteen months instead of three years and it works back from your actual numbers. Every answer traces to something in the plan, in plain language, with no jargon and no advice you can't see the reasoning for.
Outcome
An end-to-end MVP design for a product that behaves like a CFO rather than a spreadsheet, with the framing settled: this is a decision tool, not a tracker. The work sharpened how I think about designing for trust, because a product that asks for your payslip has to earn that in the first thirty seconds, and about how much of financial anxiety is really just not being able to see the consequences of a choice. It's the second in a set of self-initiated products I'm designing and building to close the loop between design and delivery.