Meadow Pre

A pre-collections product built from the ground up — helping institutions recover past-due balances, re-enroll students, and eliminate manual outreach work.

Principal Product Designer

0→1 · UX, UI, Design System, Prototyping, Research, QA

Jan 2025 — Apr 2025

Challenge

Past-due student balances are a growing crisis. 72% of schools carry balances exceeding $1M, 52% saw those balances increase in 2024, and 20–30% of accounts receivable are written off annually.

The way schools handled it made things worse — 86% relied on fully manual processes: generic emails, spreadsheets, phone calls that rarely landed. With transcript hold bans gaining traction across states, institutions were losing leverage without gaining better tools.

The result: frustrated staff, students who felt cornered, and revenue slipping through the cracks.

Solution

Pre needed to feel compassionate, not punitive — and had to be built on top of Meadow's existing Pay infrastructure, within strict regulatory guardrails (FDCPA, SMS carrier rules, state installment loan regulations).

Automated Outreach

A 12-week email and SMS campaign, personalized with the student's name, balance, and school branding. The sequence escalates deliberately — past-due notice, urgent reminder, final notice — and stops automatically the moment a student takes action.

Zero-Friction Payments

A student can go from SMS to completed payment in 4 clicks. This was built with the same components we used for Meadow Pay.

Flexible Payment Plans

Self-service plans of up to 24 monthly installments, with autopay, automatic reminders, and smart handling of missed payments. No manual intervention from staff.

Admin & Reporting

Full visibility into every student's status: who's been contacted, who's on a plan, who's resolved, who needs escalation. Daily exports make handoff clean and auditable.

Results

  • 87% reduction in manual staff workload

  • 62% of past-due balances recovered

  • 38% average student re-enrollment rate

  • Became Meadow's leading product, deepening existing relationships and driving new school sales