It started where every project does, with a Mission Plan. The point is to get assumptions out of everyone's heads and onto the table: define success in measurable terms, build the messaging architecture, set personas, run the competitive analysis, and more. The goal is to become a genuine expert in the product before proposing a single solution. I ran a heuristic audit across 170-plus screens, documenting friction and points of doubt across the business owner, retail investor, and institutional investor paths. I grounded it in real behavior with an analytics review, a support-inbox audit, and a full-lifecycle service blueprint that traced a loan from both sides. Then I went to the people, inside the company and out. I interviewed stakeholders across Operations, Climate, Marketing, Product, Sales, and Customer Service, plus first-time retail investors, an institutional investor managing six figures across multiple loans, and business owners who had run a raise. The findings that mattered weren't one-off complaints. They were patterns that surfaced independently across every source, which is how I separated signal from noise. It all rolled up into one living document the whole team shared: a single, evidence-backed source of truth to prioritize against.