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Sarmiza

Simplifying Compliance for the Globally Mobile

William Barron

MY ROLE

Founding Product Designer & Manager

Branding

TEAM

Elsa Zhou, Founder

Tracy Zhang, Engineer

TOOLS

Figma

Linear

React Native

TIMELINE

2022-2023

DESCRIPTION

A location-tracking app for tax residency compliance.

CONTEXT

I joined Nomikos as their Founding Product Designer & Manager in June 2022 amid a strategic pivot. My primary focus was designing and developing an app to simplify tax compliance for international travelers.

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Website

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App Store

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Challenge

Managing tax residency and compliance for individuals living and working in multiple jurisdictions is complex, stressful, and high-stakes. Existing solutions, including apps, spreadsheets, and manual accountant follow-ups, often fail to address this problem effectively.

After a thorough market evaluation, the Nomikos team identified an opportunity to create a unique, user-friendly solution to address these pain points. This led us to ask:

How might we simplify tax compliance for individuals living and working across multiple US States and Countries?

Constraints

Working as the only product designer and manager at an early-stage startup, while balancing college coursework, brought its own set of personal and professional challenges.

At Nomikos, I was all things design. This included product UI/UX, research, prototyping, feature prioritization, roadmapping, branding, marketing, website design, onboarding + an overwhelming amount of ideas and designs still archived in my Figma files.

Soon after I joined, we realized we needed to pivot our product direction. This drastic context underscored the speed, focus, and agility required to redefine our product strategy, develop prototypes, and validate a minimum viable product.

Goals

Our task required balancing customer and business needs.

Customer-centric goals:

Identify an ideal customer profile (ICP)

Understand user pain points

Design features addressing these pain points

Business-centric goals:

Create MVP to validate strategy

Develop product roadmap

Generate revenue while iterating toward product-market fit

Research & Synthesis

Ideal Customer Profile

Before diving into design, I focused on understanding the complex tax compliance landscape for international travelers. With a diverse potential user base aged 18-65+, we prioritized outlining customer profiles to narrow our focus. This research helped us address the variable, personal, and high-stakes nature of tax compliance for the globally mobile.

We considered the following potential customer profiles:

🛄Business Travelers

Age range: 30-55

Profession: Consultants, remote workers, and other mobile professionals

Behavior or pain point: Regularly traveling for work, potentially across multiple tax jurisdictions

👩🏻‍🎓Global Students

Age range: 18-30

Profession: Student and related part-time jobs

Behavior or pain point: Living and working in the US on visas, managing complex tax situations

🇺🇸American Expats

Age range: 25-65

Profession: Various

Behavior or pain point: Living and working abroad, navigating international tax obligations

👴🏾Snowbird Retirees

Age range: 60+

Profession: Retired

Behavior or pain point: Splitting time between northeast/coastal states and low/no tax southwest states, managing multi-state tax implications

Although there is some overlap in these profiles, we chose to target business travelers for our MVP. Their regular travel patterns, openness to productivity tools, higher income, and high-stakes compliance needs made them the ideal customer profile.

User Interviews

I developed a targeted set of questions and conducted user interviews with business travelers, including:

1. What tools do you currently use to track travel and manage tax compliance?

2. What are your biggest challenges in managing tax obligations across multiple jurisdictions?

3. When and how do you prefer to log your travel data?

4. How does frequent travel impact your tax residency status?

5. Can you describe a recent tax compliance issue you faced due to travel?

6. How do you currently manage and organize tax-related travel documentation?

After interviewing 50 people, two main pain points emerged:

Convenience: time-consuming manual tracking of travel days

Reliability: stress associated with potential compliance errors

Competitive Analysis

In addition to more antiquated solutions like spreadsheets, physical calendar logs, and manual accountant follow-ups, several existing apps seek to address this tax residency and compliance problem. A competitive analysis was conducted to understand how these apps address the two primary pain points reported by users: time-consuming manual tracking and the stress of potential compliance errors.

Below is a summary of how well three of today's leading tax residency tracking apps (Monaeo, Taxbird, and Flamingo) address these pain points:

📡 Monaeo

Convenience

Automatic travel tracking requires internet

Search trips and travel in the calendar

Requires an account and login

Confusing and cumbersome UI/UX

Manual onboarding/entry of timeline required

Reliability

Export of audit-tested reports

Early-warning alerts can be set for specific locations

Tracking enables location log for multiple years

Confusing and cumbersome UI/UX

Pricing

$ 99 per month or $ 999 per year subscription plan

App Link

1 of 3

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Conceptualization & Prioritization

User interviews and competitive analysis revealed that existing solutions failed to address two key frustrations: time-consuming manual tracking and anxiety over potential errors with costly tax implications. Synthesizing these insights, I drafted a guiding statement to embody Sarmiza's core value proposition:

"Sarmiza is the most intuitive and seamless way to manage your tax residency. You select your locations, set limits, and then simply track and relax."

User Persona

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woman in orange long sleeve shirt sitting beside table with macbook pro

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To design for our target business traveler customer profile and build an MVP to validate our product strategy, I created multiple user personas. Below is a summary of Emma, a 38-year-old New York-based consultant working across multiple countries and tax jurisdictions.

Details:

38 years old

Based in New York, NY

Senior Management Consultant at a multinational firm

MBA

Annual Income: $180K

Use Case:

Travels internationally and domestically 2-3 weeks per month

Works across multiple countries and tax jurisdictions

Values efficiency and productivity tools

Struggles with time-consuming manual tracking of travel days

Anxious about potential tax compliance errors and their costly implications

Tech-savvy and open to adopting new solutions that simplify her work life

Seeks a reliable system to manage tax residency across various locations

Product Roadmap & MVP

We defined our target customer, their pain points, and our core value proposition. From there, we conceptualized a vision for our app and its features. Using a prioritization framework I created, we ranked features based on importance and difficulty. This helped us identify the essential elements for our MVP, considering our limited resources.

I created a prioritization framework to guide our MVP development. The framework scores functionalities based on:

Demand (1-3): Importance to solving our ideal customer's problem

Impact (1-3): Potential to achieve our business goals

Effort: Estimated weeks for implementation

This approach allowed us to focus on high-demand, high-impact, and low-effort features. We quickly developed and validated our MVP, generating revenue while using feedback to iterate toward product-market fit. The framework also shaped our long-term product roadmap.

Functionality

Demand (1 highest)

Impact (1 highest)

Effort (weeks)

Score

Set Custom Limit

Day Summary

Alerts

Supporting US States

Automatic & Offline Location Tracker

Photo Scan → Timeline

Supporting Canadian Provinces

Preset: Schengen Area

iCloud Backup

Face ID / Touch ID / Pin Lock

Preset: Substantial Presence Test

There are no rows in this table

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Key Features

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At-a-glance residency threshold widgets

To meet business travelers' tax compliance needs, I designed a widget allowing users to set day limits for any location, receive alerts, and track progress. The widget features a dynamic progress bar that changes color—green for minimum thresholds, red for maximums—providing an instant visual cue of one's residency status. This design balances aesthetics with clear, confidence-inspiring data presentation.

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Progress monitoring watchlist

To address the needs of business travelers working across multiple countries and tax jurisdictions, I designed a watchlist to display multiple tracking widgets simultaneously. The simple threshold limit widgets and scrollable calendar-like experience transform an anxiety-inducing process into one of instant confidence. Users can quickly understand their residency status for all relevant jurisdictions at a glance.

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Precision tracker for location and day counts

The precision tracker widget is designed to summarize the user's current location and day count, grounding their watchlist in context. This helps users understand how their present location affects their residency status. The ability to refresh the tracker alleviates worries, assuring their timeline is automatically tracked and updated, no matter where they are.

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Intuitive timeline for travel history

I designed the timeline to arrange the user's travel history intuitively. While crucial for computing residency status, travel history is rarely needed and is housed on a separate page. The ability to generate a timeline from users' photos, developed in collaboration with our engineers, reduces the time-consuming manual onboarding process, improving conversion rates.

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Location-based day count summaries

User interviews revealed that business travelers are data-obsessed and eager to understand their travel habits beyond compliance needs. To address this, I designed a summary page showing day counts per location for any given period.

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Takeaways & Reflections

While designing the app, I was also responsible for the branding and website development. As the sole designer and product manager, juggling both projects was challenging but honed my prioritization skills based on user feedback.

User interviews sharpened my product sense and improved my ability to lead cross-functional teams and manage stakeholders. I created a product prioritization framework that ensured efficient delivery and team alignment, a tool I'll continue to use. I am deeply grateful to the team at Nomikos for entrusting me with these responsibilities and am excited to continue leveraging these skills in future endeavors.