Shayam Parasram

What I've Done

What I've Done

What I've Done

Leading the Design Sprint at Sunbound

The Challenge

Sunbound is building the financial backbone for senior living communities—connecting residents, caregivers, and operators through a seamless billing and payments platform.

But while residents could pay electronically, community operators lacked visibility and control. Teams were buried in Slack threads, spreadsheets, and manual tracking just to understand what was happening with payments.

Prompt

Facilitate a design sprint to uncover pain points in the operator workflow and define the first iteration of a dashboard tool to manage resident accounts, collect payments, and resolve issues—all in one place.

The Sprint to Move the Needle

I led a cross-functional design sprint with Sunbound’s executive team, including leaders from product, operations, and customer success. My goal? Create clarity out of chaos—and get us from “what if” ideas to actionable product direction.

We kicked things off with 6 deep-dive interviews with our core user: the Business Office Manager (BOM), often the administrative heart of these communities. Alongside them stood the payors; sometimes Independent Residents, but more often their adult children or designated caregivers.

Day 1-2: Mapping the Journey

We started by identifying Sunbound's Long Term Goal: To make managing money as easy as possible so you can focus on everything else. Simple enough right? From there, we worked out our product north star: empower Business Office Managers (BOMs) to manage payments confidently and independently.

Through team interviews and journey mapping exercises, we surfaced the friction:

  • No centralized view of resident balances

  • Inconsistent tracking of payment issues

  • Bottlenecks during move-in processes

We synthesized these into “How Might We” statements—turning abstract frustrations into solvable challenges.

Day 3-4: Generating and Testing Ideas

From quick sketches to an Art Gallery of Concepts, we explored a range of interface ideas:

  • A unified dashboard showing account status across the community

  • Resident-level views with history, actions, and communication options

  • Clear flows for common pain points like move-in payments and past-due follow-ups

I facilitated prioritization exercises to align on impact vs. effort, guiding the team toward a focused MVP direction.

Day 5: Storyboarding the MVP

We chose to prototype one critical workflow:

  1. Resolving Payment Issue Dashboard – allowing BOMs to troubleshoot and act without escalating to support

I translated our chosen flows into storyboarded screens, building momentum toward visual design and engineering handoff.

My Boldest Contribution

Turning Slack chaos into product strategy.

What I’m most proud of was creating momentum where there had only been fragmented ideas. Leading this sprint meant converting the team’s domain knowledge and frustrations into a product vision everyone could rally behind.

From sticky notes to a clickable prototype—we had clear alignment, real user flows, and an artifact we could test and build from.

The Outcome

We walked away with:

  • A simple, company long term goal & north star

  • A clearly defined MVP for the operator dashboard

  • Stakeholder alignment across product, ops, and engineering

  • User flows and interface sketches ready for rapid iteration

And most importantly, a shared sense of direction—a product born from empathy, shaped by collaboration, and designed for real-world impact.

Framer 2023

Amsterdam