Product Development Tracks at Juniper Square

Our mission at Juniper Square is to make the world’s private capital markets more efficient, transparent, and accessible. See Making Private Markets Better for more.

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In line with our core values, Juniper Square looks to constantly iterate and evolve for the better. We discussed our journey shifting from an early-stage start-up towards an organization in a previous article, Organizational Design in a High Growth Environment. That article briefly alludes to our concept of a “track”.

At Juniper Square, our product development efforts — including product, design, engineering, and quality assurance — are organized around product development tracks. This article looks to share further insight into what each of our tracks do.

Our development tracks

There are many ways to organize across functions. Some readily apparent options include organizing

• by the technological stack such as frontend or backend
• by technical components where each product development team primarily owns an existing system or subsystem
• by customer persona, where each product development team primarily owns the customer and related business outcomes

Inline with our value #BuildCustomerTrust, we lean towards a customer-focused approach.

Our product development tracks are:

• GP Experience — focused primarily on software solutions for our investment manager personas
• LP Network — focused primarily on our investor personas
• Admin Services — focused primarily on end-to-end solutions for our investment manager personas

In addition to the aforementioned product tracks, we have an engineering-specific track, Platform, which was discussed in a previous article, DevOps Comes to Juniper Square.

GP Experience

The Juniper Square vision has been consistent since day one. We’ve always had a plan on how to get there. That plan started with a focus on building scale on the GP, or General Partner, side of the marketplace.

General Partner (GP) is the term for the operating partner in a private investment. A GP may sometimes be referred to as an investment management firm. This is the party that is organizing the investment opportunity and actively working on making it happen.

The GP is involved in many activities including fundraising and then administering the investment. Fundraising operations include a CRM of their investors, creating data rooms to market investment opportunities, and getting investment commitments legally signed and approved. Administrative operations happen after funding has been secured for an investment and include transactions, reporting, tax documents, and much more.

Those workflows can quickly become repetitive and tedious to manage as investment managers scale.

Our Juniper Square investment management platform solves those issues, empowering GPs to provide better service and transparency to their investors. GPs are able to drive their partnerships forward by investing in a great investor experience.

Our GP Experience product development track is focused on making this investment management platform a success.

LP Network

An investment includes multiple parties. While the GP puts the investment opportunity together, the Limited Partner is on the other side.

The Limited Partner, or LP, is the investor. Whether an institutional investor or high-net-worth individual, they often evaluate many different opportunities, picking and choosing where, when, and how to invest their money. They are also very interested in keeping tabs of those investments, monitoring to make sure things are going as planned.

Historically, LPs have received updates and information in a very ad-hoc, manual way. We look to change that.

By improving communication and bridging the gap between information, investors can be empowered and in control of their investments. A key part of the Juniper Square platform is our online investor portal. Investors are empowered with information and the ability to take action, whether that is to view an investment opportunity’s data room, complete their investment commitment documents, review their investment performance, or manage their own profile and preferences.

Our LP Network product development track is focused on building out a robust word-class experience for these investors. Our LP Network strives to make it seamless for LPs to onboard, use, and ultimately prefer the Juniper Square platform.

We look to unlock the maximum potential between the partnerships by making it easy for GPs and LPs to work together. We believe that by strengthening this bond, we will also be able to create strong network effects that strengthen Juniper Square’s position in the market.

Admin Services

The Juniper Square investment management platform has become a critical operating system for many of our customers.

That being said, we always stay close to our customers and listen intently.

Many customers contract the software and operate it themselves internally, often with a dedicated analyst or other internal staff. As GPs scale, many wanted help administering the software so they could stay light and focus on their core business, dedicating their team’s limited time towards finding and executing on investment opportunities. Additionally, customers wanted to leverage the transparency we offer via our portal and reporting capabilities for other aspects of their business.

As this feedback surfaced, we identified an opportunity.

We created new offerings where we deliver a full-service solution. Instead of giving them access to the software, they interact with a Juniper Square employee which completes the actions and workflows on their behalf. Building on top of our investment management software, we extended into offering Fund Administration.

In under two years, this Admin Services segment became our fastest growing business unit at the company.

The Admin Services product development track is focused on building full stack software solutions that enable our Juniper Square employees, whether Investment Service Managers or Fund Accountants, to deliver these outcomes efficiently and effectively at scale. Ultimately, the Admin Services track is focused on delivering a seamless, frictionless experience for our GPs.

Closing

Our vision and strategy has been consistent since day one.

Organizing and focusing our efforts around our core competencies will continue to drive us forward.

While we are making significant progress towards it, there is much work to be done.