Bain Capital
Bain Capital wanted a portal where founders could have access to resources, contacts, and event schedules.
“Bain Capital is one of the world’s leading private investment firms. Our global team aligns our interests with those of our investors and partners for lasting impact.”
I built a system that comprised of four databases, one core dashboard, templates, and an admin hub.
The documents database is the core of the experience. Here content is broken up into single files and collections of files. Files are approached on an atomic level, so they are digestible for the founder and scalable for the client. Document hierarchy is as follows: Resource → Doc → Collection → Playbook/ Job Kit. These are all templatized, so the client can focus on the content, not the system.
The CRM is key for recommended mentors and consultants to founders. There are two types of entries – ”Person” and “Company”. Each have templates. A person has all the metadata in the form of properties, with an image and bio in the page body. Companies take this a step further, by gathering all the employees in the page body. By linking the CRM to Documents, the client can recommend applicable people and companies to founders in the form of playbooks.
The calendar's main purpose is to keep track of events and all their accompanying information. This helps the Bain team, by having one centralized area to maintain. It also keeps events limited to founders only.
The layer that wraps all databases together is the functions database. This allows for the relation of a function, such as Talent/ People, Marketing, etc. This helps database filtering and template structure.
The main dashboard is the first place founders go to get their resources. There is a welcome banner, a description of the space, and a linked doc to guide the founder through the portal.
Right of that is the upcoming events section. This is a filtered view of the calendar, only showing scheduled events.
Below that, there is a featured resources section. It is a linked view of documents, wrapped in a callout block, filtered to featured items only.
The lower section of the page is columns of curated content by their team, focused on specific functions defined by Bain.
Hidden at the bottom of the page, there is a toggle that houses all the databases. This allows for page navigation to be preserved in the breadcrumb without adding to visual noise in the portal.
As this is a portal for founders, an admin portal was essential. This is a page in their footer, that is only visible to the Bain team. This page is broken up into frontend sections – Docs, CRM, Calendar, and Functions. The key to this control is based on the status property in docs and calendar. If the status of a doc is set to “Published” it will show in the founder portal, if not, it will not be seen. If a calendar event is set to “Complete” (scheduled, complete, canceled) it will show on the front end.
Custom branding was key for Bain. So I used the Feather icon kit and applied their style guide to make it match their brand. I also added a 3D effect to make sure the icon popped on light and dark modes. These assets are pre-applied to templates, but also like in a dedicated asset database for their use.
Documentation was provided to the customer in the form of a guided Notion database. Starting from basic to more advanced.
The last step was providing proper access to pages within the workspace. since the workspace is wrapped in a single page, I simply created a group for the Bain team to have “full access” to all pages and provided everyone else “can view” access. This group was applied to the top-level page and cascaded down. The admin page has the same group added, but everyone else has “no access”.
This workspace looks simple at first, but that is the beauty of it. It is easy for founders to navigate, yet powerful to bubble up the information they are looking for.
The customer is very happy with the solution and is in the process of writing all their founder documentation now, with great success.