Mergermarket Auctions

New product innovation to drive business growth

The goal was to create and validate a proof-of-concept product that enables journalists to capture and track live M&A activity across the auction lifecycle, improving the workflow of Private Equity Dealmakers.

Product

Mergermarket - MMG

Role

Senior Product Designer

Responsibilities

Workshop Facilitation
User Research
Service Blueprint
Domain Modelling
Wire-framing / High-Fidelity Design

Overview

Extracting Data from Intelligence

Mergermarket journalists leverage their relationships to cover M&A activity, writing about company acquisitions, bids, valuations, and key players involved. Being the first to report on a live auction process, known as a “scoop,” is highly valuable to subscribers as it offers crucial market insights and potential origination opportunities.

An opportunity was identified to extract key data points from editorial content, capturing the structured data and enabling users to consume essential auction information without searching through historic news articles.

Product Discovery

I collaborated with the North American editorial and sales teams in New York to gain deep insights into auctions and assess the significant commercial impact this product could have on the business. I also led a workshop to uncover the auction process, identifying and mapping key data points throughout the auction lifecycle, driving strategic alignment and product innovation.

The editorial team already tracked auction data in a spreadsheet as part of their workflow. This information was highly valuable when covering a live auction process, and was seen as a potential opportunity to provide a structured data offering to Mergermarket subscribers.

Service Blueprint

After the workshop, I created a Service Blueprint the mapped out the M&A Auction process and the key datapoints that were identified and updated. This artefact helped visualise the end-to-end process and the datapoints. The Service blueprint would be a key artefact when designing out the content management system which would capture action datapoints.

Domain Modelling

The next step was to develop the content management system for inputting auction data into the database. I began by identifying and designing workflows for the analyst team, focusing on basic data-entry tasks like creating, editing, and deleting entries.

Each auction entry required source information, whether from Mergermarket proprietary intelligence or external/internal sources, enabling users to source data points, such as asset valuations, back to their origin. Once these core workflows were established, I mapped out more complex scenarios, including splitting or merging auction entries post-creation.

Auction Workflow

Once an understanding of the data points captured was understood with the team. The second part was understanding the relationship between these entities.

This was sketched out on a whiteboard and formed the blueprint for how information is captured and how it is organised and stored on a database. Not only that, it helps visualise the complex relationships between entities.

Content Management System

The content management system would allow the editorial team to swiftly input auction data into the database, a critical step given the project's tight deadline. To expedite development and ensure the database was populated with auction data as quickly as possible. I suggested adopting a third party UI toolkit for rapid CMS deployment, ensuring the team focus on rapid development and not creating UI components.