Pitchbook Market Size estimates

Background
PitchBook is a data platform providing investors with valuable information on companies, investors and other service providers. Our users include Venture Capitalists, Investment Banker Analysts, Private Equity Investors, Corporate Development Teams or Law Firms, among others. PitchBook’s data is used to learn more about emerging companies or to search for companies in a specific industry. They are known in the capital market industry to be the “top provider of global financial data, research, and insights”. PitchBook was purchased by Morningstar in 2016 and has since expanded its data set into the public equity market.

Challenge
Although PitchBook is committed to serving it’s customers holistic research and analysis on the evolving capital markets, we lacked a feature that provided Market Size Estimates for a given industry. It was identified by Leadership, Customer Success and our Machine Learning team that this was a feature our users desired, and verified information that we had access to. Our clients needed this up to date information in on what was happening in the market in order to do their jobs, and were having to go elsewhere to find it.

Goal
Build a tool for our users to access verifiable, and customizable market size estimates for 30k+ markets.

Process | Understand and Define
Who will use it?

Private investors, corporations and LPs require rigorous due diligence and sector expertise before investing. The Market Size Estimates tool will be invaluable to professionals in order to:

ensure strategies still hold up,
have a better understand positioning in the market,
forecast strategic opportunities,
monitor competition
and stay up to date on evolving market projections.

Research
As the UX Design Lead I worked with my Product Manager to fully understand the the problem by meeting with our internal Research & Analysis Team, Financial Writers and our Machine Learning Team. Their expertise proved invaluable to create a full picture of what our users want and the verifiable data that we could provide.

I started researching our platforms existing data visualization, filtering, and other features that we might utilize in our tool. I also gathered other visualizations of market size estimates in order to hone in on what ours would look like, how it would function and what to highlight. Having just built out PitchBooks new Box and Whisker Plots and Line Graphs it was a straightforward transition to visually represent market size estimates in a bar chart.

Process | Problem Statement
Our research and information gathering led us to our problem statement which we refer back to throughout the project and use as a reference point during presentations with leadership and iterations as we hone in on the final product.

How might we provide our users with high quality market size estimates, so that they can invest or present their clients with verifiable information to forecast strategic opportunities.

Feature List
Our research and discovery led us to a comprehensive feature list approved by leadership.

Link results to give a full, transparent picture of where the information came from
Provide user the ability to customize the search by sector, geography, year, source and publish date
Ability to download ready-made, visual and verifiable material to add to a presentation
Leverage artificial intelligence to provide personalized suggestions based on the users search term with the ability to add or remove similar or adjacent markets to their search

Paper Prototyping
I moved into paper prototyping exploring entry-point to the feature, how the search would begin, where suggested markets would appear, how the markets would be represented visually, where the user could filter and how the verifiable and linked sources would appear.

These were presented to stakeholders for iterative feedback before we moved to mockups.

Mockups
During the design process it was identified that some users would prefer the linked resources in a more visual news feed view, and other users would prefer PitchBook’s typical data dense view.

Results
The product launched in Q2 of 2020 and has proved to be an invaluable tool on the PitchBook platform providing invaluable Market Size Estimates for professionals to forecast strategic opportunities and monitor their competition.

PitchBook Launches Market Size Estimates Feature to Track 30,000 Distinct Sectors

Press Release: PitchBook now offers 120K+ unique market size estimates for 30K+ markets