Banking at a different scale

Customers who managed more than one company had to enter each Mercury account separately to see balances, move money, or download statements. Panorama gave them a bird's-eye view across every organization. For the Virality team, it also worked at two kinds of scale: depth, by helping existing customers bring more of their banking to Mercury; and breadth, by making Mercury work for accountants, bookkeepers, and other multi-organization operators.

Designing the plane mid-flight

The normal process runs through multiple rounds of speccing and design exploration before anything gets built. Panorama didn't get that luxury. A narrow engineering window meant we had to start building before the full product was defined, so we agreed on a v0 approach: a minimal spec built on explorations the broader design team had kicked off during Design Week earlier in 2023 — just enough for engineers to begin the foundation while I designed and tested the v1 experience in parallel. Once the first viable spec was ready, we ran usability sessions with accountants, bookkeepers, and other multi-org operators, onboarding them early to gather the feedback that would shape our go-to-market.

A beta leak

The earliest signal that Panorama had legs was customer affinity. Beta users sent detailed feedback about what worked, what did not, and what they wanted next. Some were enthusiastic enough to post screenshots of the beta emails on X — the first time we had seen a private beta leak into public view.

Affinity isn't success, though. For Panorama to work long-term, the feature set has to keep expanding until it's genuinely powerful for every kind of multi-org customer.

Thinking in bulk

The loudest request from the accounting audience was bulk month-end statement downloads. Bookkeepers running multiple companies' books on Mercury were logging into each company and digging through its Documents section, one by one, every single month.

Panorama is the surface in Mercury for multi-org workflows, so this was a no-brainer for launch. It took real back-end lift, but the front end is almost comically simple: a modal that downloads the current month's statements as one ZIP file, with the same option for any previous month.

Simple to approach from a design perspective, demanding to build. Panorama requires us to think, design, work, and build at a different scale.