Scaling new digital solutions to millions of customers

Challenge

A large financial institution wanted to lead the industry with personalized tools that empower consumers to set financial goals and track progress.

Success hinged on a clear, compelling vision and a strong business case for consumer impact and business growth.

Approach

Led a cross-business innovation initiative to explore behavioral trends and emerging consumer needs.

Ran a series of design sprints over 8 weeks with a small core team of experts to rapidly ideate, prototype, and test new product concepts.

Outcomes

Presented a comprehensive product strategy to senior executives to gain alignment on a north star vision, multi-year roadmap, MVP design, and GTM plan.

Key features were launched to tens of millions of consumers via the company’s mobile app and digital banking platforms.

“When you visualize an idea in a tangible way, you give leaders something specific they can react to. This was a super powerful approach to get everyone aligned.”

– Product Management Executive

Increasing customer retention while reducing costs

Challenge

The operations organization responsible for collecting overdue payments for a $10B+ consumer lending business was falling short of key performance metrics.

A significant redesign of the current process was needed to improve both customer experience and business outcomes.

Approach

Conducted customer interviews, call center staff discussions, and data analysis to surface key issues and pain points with the current process.

Facilitated a multi-week innovation effort with a small core team to uncover root causes of underperformance and propose dramatic changes.

Outcomes

Delivered a redesigned service model and personalized messaging strategy that improved customer retention and reduced operating expense.

Demonstrated a repeatable, human-centered design approach that the organization adopted for future challenges.

“I can’t imagine there’s a business in this entire company where this process wouldn’t provide significant value”

– Executive Vice President

Accelerating innovation speed to market

Challenge

A Fortune 100 company’s new product delivery pace was constrained by a highly manual, inefficient risk assessment process.

The team needed to accelerate speed to market on par with emerging competitors while maintaining strong risk management performance.

Approach

Led a custom multi-week initiative with a small cross-functional team of product, operations, and risk managers to assess and reengineer the current process.

Used a zero-based, human-centered design approach to pursue bold transformation rather than incremental improvement.

Outcomes

Designed a new process that reduced average cycle times by over 100 days and cut annual operating costs by tens of millions while enhancing employee experiences.

In addition to the core process redesign, prototyped digital experience concepts that helped make the case for future platform investments that would amplify impact.

“I feel like we got more done in 8 weeks than would normally take a year or two.”

– Corp Risk Manager

Expanding markets and boosting sales

Challenge

A global multi-level marketing (MLM) company was finding that their current products and how they market and sell were becoming less relevant to younger generations.

They needed to change both what was being offered and how it was being sold.

Approach

Benchmarked successful business reinventions in adjacent industries.

Talked with customers to understand their needs and preferred shopping methods. Talked with channel partners to understand their willingness and ability to adapt.

Researched and evaluated lifestyle and life-stage based product opportunity areas, helping the team make their innovation pipeline processes more human-centered.

Outcomes

Recommended product category restructuring and changes in the current sales channel to align with lifestyles.

Identified new online and social-media based sales channels to expand into.

Identified that lifestyle and life-stage based product bundles had the potential to increase overall sales, as well as cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

“We were reluctant to change something that had worked for us for the last 50 years, but now I wonder what took us so long.”

– VP of Product

Future-proofing the business with strategic foresight

Challenge

A Fortune 100 company's enterprise innovation team needed to define its 12–18 month roadmap of strategic initiatives.

The roadmap charter was to focus on disruptive opportunities that aligned with the team’s mandate to experiment with new business and product concepts.

Approach

Collaborated with the team to synthesize research on emerging social, technological, economic, and environmental trends likely to impact customers over the next 5+ years.

Facilitated a custom two-day workshop to explore future customer and business applications of emerging technologies, such as AI, blockchain, and mixed reality.

Outcomes

Identified a portfolio of 10–12 high-potential opportunity areas, backed by insights to guide investment prioritization.

Delivered recommendations to a senior leadership forum, including the Head of Innovation, that secured support to advance several new initiatives.

“This process was awesome. We should do this regularly to keep our pipeline fresh and relevant.”

– Enterprise Innovation Executive

Enhancing the employee experience with AI

Challenge

The Digital Product Operations leadership team at a $75B+ company needed a strategy to integrate AI capabilities across the organization.

Their goal was to identify high-impact, targeted use cases to significantly boost employee productivity and free up more time for strategic work.

Approach

Facilitated a custom half-day workshop during an executive leadership offsite to introduce cutting-edge AI developments and explore business-specific opportunities.

Prioritized employee pain points across day-to-day workflows and used a tailored ideation framework to identify AI solutions addressing the most critical needs.

Outcomes

Delivered a prioritized portfolio of AI use cases, several of which were selected for proof-of-concept with the company’s enterprise AI partner.

Ensured strong adoption potential by applying a repeatable, human-centered design approach.

“This is exactly what we needed to define a clear direction for AI adoption.”

– Operations Managing Director

Aligning missions and reducing risk

Challenge

A non-profit heritage center was considering a merger with another non-profit organization.

They needed a smart but simple way to carefully evaluate this potential opportunity.

The analysis had to balance their passion for historic preservation, education, and community engagement with their limited resources and their future vision.

Approach

Developed a custom framework to assess how well the two organizations aligned strategically, including potential synergies and possible risks.

Coached the Executive Director on how to use the framework to lead productive discussions with their Board and the other non-profit.

Provided guidance on how to facilitate transparent, inclusive decision-making sessions that brought everyone's voices into the process.

Outcomes

Both organizations, using the framework, deepened their understanding of each other's goals and thoroughly evaluated the potential merger.

They jointly decided a merger didn't align with their missions, but were confident in the decision and strengthened their relationship as a result.

“Balancing our community focus with new opportunities was challenging, but the framework helped tremendously.”

– Executive Director

Adopting a more human-centered approach

Challenge

The Head of HR of a large healthcare organization, with 20 primary health care clinics, wanted to introduce human-centered design to their executive leadership team during their annual retreat.

They wanted this introduction to be energizing and experiential so that their leaders could quickly grasp the value of taking a human-centered approach to problem-solving in a variety of business contexts.

Approach

Delivered a proven 1-hour, introduction to Human-Centered Design Thinking workshop.

Facilitated a highly interactive and engaging learning experience for 40 executives.

Outcomes

The executives gained insights into the power of human-centered design while also having fun. Many shared the session was the highlight of the retreat.

The company requested a proposal to help them use a human-centered approach to reimagine the care experience for both the patient and staff.

“This experience has shifted my perspective on problem-solving in healthcare.”

– PMO Office Leader