The Risk Module is an add-on module NextRequest customers can use to identify sensitive information in documents uploaded before manual review. This product was born out of two high level objectives that tied back into our company’s mission, and was reinforced by the early market research completed by our senior product manager and CEO. These objectives were:
To help our customers reduce the time it takes to find sensitive information in uploaded documents that needed review, thereby delivering information to the public faster.
To help build trust in uploading documents with sensitive data and hopefully making it more likely agencies will publish documents not just for the requester, but for the public at large.
On the business end, we were hoping that investing time and resources into a ‘sole source’ feature that our competitors don’t have an answer for would help drive more customers to NextRequest and increase the ACV of our premium package offering.
We set out to have a first launch and purchasable offering by the end of Quarter 3, which resulted in about a five month project. In this time frame my team completed initial market research, stakeholder workshops, customer testing and interviews, design iterations, engineering QA, and supporting product marketing and launch. This primarily consisted of two backend engineers, two frontend engineers, a product manager and myself.
Like many software companies, NextRequest has reached the point where a design system has become necessary. Many folks have defined what is and isn’t a Design System (here is a good one that has a billion definitions), and many of the reasons other companies decided to pursue this project are the same reasons we did. Consistency, clarity, speed, scalability, modernity, performance, etc. etc. are all things we are hoping to get out of a new design system.
The hard thing is deciding how to start, especially when your product is already in production. Though we are concurrently embarking on multiple pieces of the project at once (a component inventory, for example, is already in progress), one of the first things I wanted to do is align our approach to how we make design decisions. We needed to create some grounded design principles!