Product Designer & Researcher, Creative Technologist
Client: Carson Group
Role: Innovation Strategist & Researcher
Scope: Discovery, Competitive Analysis, Qualitative Interviews, Customer Insights, Concepts, Roadmap
- Overview
- Carson Group, a national wealth management partner firm, needed to launch a rebranded website on a timeline tied to any upcoming annual event, while also laying the groundwork for a more ambitious "2.0" experience that lacked definition around cross-functional service delivery.
- I led the Customer Insights research track running alongside that rebrand: a two-round stakeholder interview program (12 sessions, 14 leaders spanning sales, talent, M&A, marketing, and investments) built to answer one question: how is the website used as a tool in recruiting new advisors to Carson does the website actually function inside Carson's advisor-recruitment engine?
- I synthesized that research, alongside parallel brand-health and persona work from partner agencies, into a point-of-view report, a segmented journey library, and a four-workstream product roadmap, ultimately giving the marketing leadership a shared, evidence-based case for evolving and shaping the brand to better support business outcomes.
A brand had outgrown
its website
Carson had scaled into one of the largest RIAs in the country, but its digital front door hadn't kept pace. Leadership needed the site to carry a different kind of weight than it was built for — and to do it on a timeline that didn't allow for figuring out what that weight actually was.
The existing CarsonGroup.com organized itself around three "emotional buckets" — Run Your Business, Grow Your Business, Love Your Business — a structure that had made sense at an earlier stage but now sat awkwardly over a much larger, more complex offering. Internally, the brand's own diagnosis was blunt: Carson needed to move from many stories to one connected brand, from regional player to national credibility, from founder-led to enterprise-led.
That left two problems that couldn't be solved on the same timeline. The business needed the new brand live on the site by summer — in time for the Partner Summit — which meant a rapid, largely like-for-like rebuild ("1.5"). But everyone agreed the site also needed to become something more strategic: an active tool in recruiting financial advisors, not just a brochure that happened to be online. Nobody had systematically asked the people who actually use the site every day — sales, talent acquisition, M&A, investments — what that would require. That gap was the starting point for my track of the work.
Two workstreams, one clock
The engagement split into parallel tracks running the same sixteen weeks. Workstream 1 was the visual rebrand — reskinning CarsonGroup.com with the new identity on an accelerated schedule. Workstream 2, mine, was the Customer Insights Program: a discovery effort chartered to express a future vision that could inform product strategy and roadmap for Carson's next-generation experience, without slowing down the rebrand happening beside it. Every finding I brought back was explicitly filtered against one question — is 1.5 already fixing this? — so leadership's attention stayed on what 2.0 actually needed to solve.
Interviewing the people who sell the website every day
Rather than start with prospective advisors — who are hard to reach and harder to interview mid-decision — I started inside Carson, with the people whose job is to read prospective advisors correctly: sales leadership, talent acquisition, M&A, marketing, and the firm's public-facing investment strategists. The directive I set for the program was direct: excavate institutional knowledge about the prospective advisor experience, and understand how the website is used internally as a tool in the recruitment process.
Every session ran the same four-question protocol, so findings could be compared across very different roles:
- Where in the journey does an advisor typically visit the site, and what are they trying to answer when they do?
- Which stage of the decision does the website most influence?
- Where is the journey hardest — and does the site help or get in the way at that moment?
- If you could change one thing about the current site, what would it be?
Reading the research already in motion
Two other workstreams were running in parallel through partner agencies — a competitive brand-health study benchmarking Carson's familiarity and consideration against firms like Mariner, Creative Planning, and Hightower, and a persona and journey-mapping effort segmenting prospective advisors into independent (1099), M&A, and W2 profiles. Part of my job was to read both against my own interview findings, so the 2.0 case I brought to leadership wasn't one team's opinion — it was three independent research streams converging on the same short list of gaps.
Turning "what should 2.0 do" into a shared answer
A working definition of what the website is actually for
The single most useful reframe to come out of the interviews was that almost nobody inside Carson treated the website as a lead-generation engine — and the data backed them up. Advisors don't discover Carson cold; they hear about it first from a recruiter, a banker, a colleague, or a podcast, and only then check the site to see if what they heard holds up.
"The prospective advisor journey begins long before anyone visits the website. The website's most important job is to be an engine of trust and confirmation, not a lead generation tool."
— Research synthesis, Prospective Advisor Digital Experience Report
That reframing carried a second, sharper idea that leadership adopted as shorthand for the whole program:
"Complacency is our biggest competitor."
— Recurring theme across stakeholder interviews
Advisors rarely leave a firm because a competitor out-markets Carson — they leave, or don't, based on whether the pain of staying finally outweighs the pain of a hard, disruptive move. That single idea reoriented the roadmap conversation away from "more polish" and toward content and moments that actively reduce the cost of that decision.
Restructuring around how advisors actually decide
The legacy "emotional bucket" navigation — Run / Grow / Love Your Business — didn't map to how any of the three advisor segments actually moved through a decision. Working from the interview findings, I helped simplify the structure around two real funnels: what Carson can do for an advisor, and the different ways an advisor can actually join. The three legacy buckets collapsed into a single Advisor Solutions section; a new Work With Us hub replaced a scattered set of affiliation pages; and legacy content was pushed to the footer rather than competing with it.
A four-workstream roadmap, not a wish list
The research needed to land as something leadership could actually plan against, not a list of interesting findings. I organized every insight into a product roadmap spanning four workstreams from Q3 2026 through Q2 2027, with each line item traceable back to a specific point-of-view finding:
- Content Creation — segment-specific pathways for M&A, 1099, and W2 advisors; first-person "why I made the move" transition stories; a due-diligence and transition-support hub.
- Optimization — a navigation and IA overhaul, a lighter and more segment-appropriate CTA strategy, and mobile optimization once interview data pointed to late-night, high-consideration browsing sessions.
- Platform & Integrations — lead scoring and routing so a site visit no longer dumps every form fill on the sales team unfiltered, plus intent-signal detection for behaviors like repeat use of the valuation calculator.
- Campaigns & Launches — a phased rollout sequencing segment content launches against the 1.5 launch, a testimonial campaign, and the full 2.0 release.
Making the recruiting use case visible to leadership
The most consequential finding wasn't structural — it was that the people closest to the prospective-advisor experience understood their audience deeply, but had never been asked how the website specifically should support them. A member of Carson's national sales leadership, describing the firm's high-touch, white-glove home-office visit for advisors flying in to evaluate the firm, put the gap plainly:
"We have to just get them to Omaha. Because once you get to Omaha, you get it. You understand it. You walk in the building, you meet the people."
— National Sales Director, Executive Leadership Team
The problem, of course, is that Carson can't fly every prospective advisor to Omaha before they decide whether the trip is worth taking. Surfacing that tension gave leadership a concrete design target for 2.0: a site that does more of the persuasive work the in-person visit currently does alone — before an advisor ever books the flight.
What leadership took away
Sales, talent, and marketing had each been treating the website as somebody else's tool. The 2.0 opportunity wasn't a redesign so much as an alignment: a site that sales, talent, and marketing all actively use and are proud to put in front of a prospect — rather than one they merely tolerate.
Grounding 2.0 before a line of code was written
What made the research land wasn't the interview count or the roadmap format — it was giving sales, talent, and marketing a shared vocabulary for a tool they'd each been quietly reinventing on their own. By the time the 2.0 roadmap reached leadership, it wasn't a pitch for a redesign. It was a plan the people closest to Carson's advisors had already recognized as their own thinking, organized.
Some names, quotes, and figures in this case study have been generalized or attributed by role rather than by individual, in keeping with the confidentiality of client stakeholder research.