Our commitment is to deliver a best-in-class experience for Addepar clients. We take pride in offering a platform that is not only powerful but intuitive, efficient and easy to use. As we expand our platform, user experience continues to be a priority.

This commitment was evident during our recent company-wide hackathon, a dedicated two-week sprint where teams from across Addepar focused on ways to enhance the user experience by solving workflow challenges, improving ease of execution on the platform and more. The hackathon saw participants from all teams across Addepar and several enhancements have been released to clients with the goal of improving the overall ease of use of our platform.

To learn more about our philosophy and why this investment is so critical, we sat down with Katie Mentus, Vice President of User Experience and Design, and Janeen France, Chief Client Officer. They shared what it takes to balance powerful features with an intuitive experience and why putting clients at the center of innovation is non-negotiable.

Welcome! Let's dive right in. Addepar recently organized a hackathon focused on client experience. What was the inspiration behind that, and why is focusing on client experience so critical right now?

Katie: Addepar has invested heavily in innovation, and we've brought a lot of powerful new capabilities to market. We reached a point where we realized that, alongside building new functionality, we needed to balance new features with continuing to invest in the user experience. It’s crucial that our clients can operate at a high level of excellence. This year felt like the perfect moment to pause, gather as an organization and focus on removing friction from the platform. Our clients deliver a superior experience to their clients, and they rightfully expect the same from us.

Janeen: Precisely. Clients are drawn to Addepar for our ability to handle immense complexity and distill it into a clear, actionable story for them and their own investors. The more we empower our clients, the more value they are able to derive from our platform. Our goal is to make sure that value is easily accessible and not lost as we innovate. This hackathon was a strategic investment to ensure our usability scales with our power, and an important part of our commitment to ensuring ease of use is the direct pathway to client value.

The term "hackathon" might be unfamiliar to some of our readers. Could you explain what it is and what made this one unique? 

Katie: A hackathon is a dedicated time period where teams come together to innovate, explore new ideas and build solutions under a time constraint. This hackathon was particularly special for two reasons. First, it embraced two of our company’s core values: Drive Innovation and Champion our Clients. Second, we were able to release several enhancements shortly after the hackathon concluded. We channeled our creative energy directly into making a tangible, positive impact on our clients' daily experience. That focus set this hackathon apart.

Janeen: This hackathon is an incredibly powerful mechanism for driving cross-functional collaboration and generating fresh ideas. It directs our entire organization’s creative energy toward a single, critical outcome: How can we make our clients' lives easier? This hackathon focused on reducing friction in workflows, ultimately saving our clients’ time and enabling them to focus on growth and client relationships. 

Katie: To Janeen’s point, this wasn’t just an R&D event. We partnered across Addepar, bringing our client-facing teams directly into the innovation process. Our client teams are on the front lines and understand our clients’ pain points. By combining their insights with our best technical and creative minds, we were able to collaborate closely to drive great outcomes from the event.

Hackathon presentations in Addepar’s Pune, India office.

That collaboration between user experience and client management is key. How do your two teams work together to ensure Addepar is both powerful and intuitive?

Janeen: We partner closely and have both formal and informal feedback mechanisms. Our goal is to bring the client's voice to the table — what we are doing well, where we can improve, what they need and what they would like to see. We provide feedback through every stage and also have opportunities for clients to provide feedback directly, whether through product research meetings, providing feedback on early mock-ups, or participating in a beta program. When we push a release, we want the new functionality or enhancement to be intuitive and deliver exactly what our client needs. 

Katie: We then take that feedback and look at it horizontally across the entire platform. We ask ourselves questions such as, “how can we solve this pain point in a way that unifies workflows and makes the whole system more efficient?” That constant dialogue is what enables us to build the best, most cohesive solutions. Internal and external feedback plays an important role in our short-term and long-term strategic planning.

We hear a lot about being "client-centric" as a company. How do you make sure client feedback shapes the product?

Katie: Client feedback is the bedrock of our building process. We typically start by conducting foundational research to deeply understand the problem or challenge we're solving. As we progress to a prototype, we seek feedback from clients to answer core questions such as: Does this actually work? Does it add value? From there, we may also solicit feedback through various beta programs and often continue to solicit client input after a release to inform future iterations. The client's voice is present from the very beginning to the very end.

Janeen: To compound that, we strive to create as many channels as possible for our clients’ voices to be heard. In addition to the feedback opportunities mentioned, we also have community meetups, our annual user conference, AddeConf, regular webinars with product managers and, of course, our Idea Portal. Clients are at the center of almost everything you see on our roadmap.

We’re putting considerable resources into making our product easier to use. From your perspective, why is this investment just as important as building new features?

Janeen: Great question, it’s easy to focus on only new capabilities or features, but think about any app you use. If it’s slow or has a confusing layout, you are likely not going to be a user of that app for long, no matter how powerful. The power of Addepar is why clients choose us, but the intuitive feel is why they keep using our platform. The easier it is to use, the more value our clients can derive from the platform. If clients spend their time on our platform in a productive and efficient way, that time will directly translate to better service and higher satisfaction for their own clients.

Katie: I agree. It’s about making things truly useful. A useful product has two ingredients: utility — it does what you need — and usability — it’s easy to do. We don't want to just check boxes with new features. We want to deliver solutions that save people time and let them focus on what matters most. The "what" and the "how" have to work together.

It sounds like the hackathon had amazing energy. Can you describe the atmosphere and how you celebrated the results?

Katie: The energy was fantastic. You could see organic collaboration happening in real time — engineers, product managers, designers and client managers all ideating and building together. We held an awards ceremony at the end where teams presented their projects. It was inspiring to see both what they built, and the deep thinking that went into the problems they were solving. We had awards for a variety of categories including a  "Client Impact" award, which made the hackathon a really fun and rewarding experience for everyone.

Janeen: The energy was impressive. I appreciate that we look to recognize the participants from different angles — “Best Efficiency,” “Most Innovative,” “Product Polish” and more. I was also delighted that several teams reimagined existing functionality. We have many workflows that clients complete repeatedly throughout the course of a single day. Hearing teams ask, "How can we raise the bar and make this core task even more seamless?" was very exciting. For our clients, often the most meaningful innovations are not brand new features, but rather radical improvements to the workflows and seemingly simple tasks they perform every day.

With so many projects, how did you recognize the standout ideas? Can you tell us about some of the award winners?

Katie: It was incredibly tough to choose because the quality was so high across the board. We judged projects on a few key criteria: the scale of the client impact, the creativity of the solution and how well it embodied our principle of making the complex simple. 

The winners really stood out. For example, our “Best Efficiency” award went to a team designing a solution that both frees up time for our clients and empowers their clients to self-serve. It was a perfect example of listening to client feedback and delivering a truly elegant solution.

Janeen: I was thrilled to see the winning projects, as many of them were a true validation of our client-centric model. For instance, taking home the "Client Impact" award, one project tackled the crucial issue of client trust by redesigning automated emails. They replaced the outdated, unbranded templates that created ambiguity with a modern, professional experience that instantly aligns with firm branding, thereby legitimizing communication and assuring clients of its authenticity. Seeing that direct line from a client pain point to an innovative solution is what this event was all about.

The hackathon is a fantastic, focused effort. But looking more broadly, how is Addepar ensuring that client feedback and making the platform intuitive are at the core of what you do year-round?

Katie: The hackathon is an accelerator, but the work is continuous. Our recently redesigned product roadmap is a great example of this long-term commitment. We’ve made it more transparent and client-centric, so everyone can see our plan for delivering powerful, easy-to-use solutions. Technology is the engine that makes this possible. AI, for instance, was at the heart of over 75% of the hackathon projects. We're leveraging it as a practical tool to automate repetitive tasks, surface critical insights proactively and handle the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Our goal is to build a smarter platform so the experience for our clients is seamless.

Janeen: Exactly, we also brought that commitment to life in our recent initiative, “That's easy with Addepar.” In it, we highlight how clients are solving their everyday challenges with Addepar through various intuitive, value-driving activities that clients can accomplish on our platform. It served as a great conversation starter with clients to discuss their experience and how we can continue to streamline workflows and enhance our platform to allow them more time to focus on their own clients. Regardless of the setting, our core questions are always: Will this make a client’s day tangibly easier? Will it help them to grow and scale? That is how we ultimately measure our success.

To close, if you had to sum it up in one sentence, why is building for and with clients so central to innovation at Addepar?

Janeen: One of our core beliefs at Addepar is collaboration. We believe collaboration and varying perspectives truly drive better outcomes. You may have seen or heard us use the phrase, "Altogether better." By building in lockstep with our clients, we make sure our innovation is aligned with their success, leading to the best outcomes for all. 

Katie: Our clients' success is our success. When we focus on what they need to succeed, it pushes us to be more innovative and make better decisions, which ultimately helps us better serve them and grow with them.


To learn more about the winning projects, check out their deep dive posts here: