IP Terminal.

Most companies and investors could barely see which patents a company held, let alone what they were worth. Answers lived in spreadsheets and analyst requests, and every question needed an in-house expert. Our group was building machine learning and analytics to do that work at scale.

Two groups needed it: investors valuing companies by their IP, and businesses tracking competitors and acquisition targets. I worked out the information architecture first, from a market overview down to a single company, and tested it with stakeholders, our analysts and customers before designing screens.

The analytics behind it made Aon’s first IP-backed loan possible, with a company’s patents as the collateral. IP Terminal put that analysis in a SaaS product, a Bloomberg terminal for IP assets, and it won our first enterprise clients.

This was a zero-to-one product, so we judged it by whether it solved the right problem. User testing, stakeholder reviews and customer demos told us that.