Thirteen years in fintech will teach you a certain shape of problem: high stakes, tight compliance, users who already speak the domain's language. This year, I stepped out of that lane.
I'm several months into a project with an NGO, and it's been a useful kind of uncomfortable.
The work
The organisation runs on volunteers who support caregivers, and the operational load behind that is bigger than it looks: onboarding new volunteers, matching them to the right caregiver, tracking hours actually worked, and managing the donations that fund all of it. Right now, most of that lives across manual processes and spreadsheets — the plan is to run it all on Salesforce.
Why it's different
Fintech users are usually trained analysts working inside systems they already trust. Here, the people entering data are volunteer coordinators, doing this alongside everything else, with far less patience for friction. The stakes aren't regulatory — they're human. A bad match, or a caregiver who falls through the cracks because a handoff wasn't tracked.
That's made me rethink what “usable” actually means.
What's next
I started this at the beginning of the year, and I'll be documenting it here in phases — discovery, the Salesforce build, and whatever we learn once it's actually in volunteers' hands. Consider this entry one.