USAA

Service Design Lead
November, 2021 - Current

American Family Insurance

Design Strategist
January, 2020 - October, 2021

Innovation Catalyst
September, 2017 - December, 2019

SERVICE DESIGN LEAD

Support USAA Bank product and design teams in their effort to understand the breadth and depth of their current state digital product experiences and reimagine those experience, using member data, to solve problems and deliver delight. Recent accomplishments:

• Led an educational session for Agile Coaches to become practitioners of Human-Centered Design, enabling them to guide their teams in techniques to make faster, smarter, member-focused product decisions.

• Guided the creation of an executive VP-level working session to align and decide on foundational elements for a USAA Rewards program.

• Designed & facilitate a working session for the checking and deposits bank product teams resulting in the creation of a 3-year strategic, product roadmap designed to increase customer acquisition and product revenue. The working session was followed by generative research and interactive member working sessions in which product teams worked with potential members to ideate on new banking products and features that deliver tangible member value.

• Performed research and synthesized data that provided the USAA Chief Design Office with an understanding of the strategic impact the centralized design organization has had with line of business partners. The results of the research, have enabled executive leaders to determine strategic priorities related to talent acquisition, talent development as well as value delivery related to digital product management.

• Collaborated to create a repeatable, twice-a-year team health assessment process designed to allow support for individual contributors and escalate unhealthy team circumstances to executive leadership. The program is in it’s second full year, has onboarded 4 new facilitators (total of 8), performed 21 team health checks, delivered 3 summarized team health reports to executive leadership and has been scaled to evaluate leadership team health across the Chief Design Office.

DESIGN STRATEGIST

Used design process and mindset to find holistic solutions to ambiguous and complex, cross-enterprise problems​​​​​​. Collaborate with partners and stakeholders to co-create customer-driven solutions that are as simple as they are effective. Projects completed this year include:

• Auto COE, Know Your Drive Experience Design

  • Project Objective: Discover opportunities for improvement to the Know Your Drive experience outside of the app for agents, policy holders, and customer service reps

  • Project Outcomes: Identified top 2 root causes impacting the end-to-end experience for agents, customers, and service reps.

  • My Role: Conducted quantitative & qualitative research; performed content inventory and analysis.

• Auto COE, Innovation Pipeline Strategy & Design

  • Project Objective: Design strategy & process for moving concepts from idea stage to scaling multiple markets

  • Project Outcomes: Created a vision for a potential pipeline and am currently working with leadership to develop a roll-out strategy

  • My Role: Combined concepts from Lean Start-up, design thinking, agile, and Strategyzer (creators of the Business Model Canvas) with learnings from qualitative research to create an Auto COE specific innovation process

• Independent Agent Channel Landscape Research

  • Project Objective: Develop a body of knowledge & internal expertise about independent agency norms and needs on a national scale.

  • Project Outcomes: Channel insights and design principles that are exclusive to the American Family Insurance Enterprise. This work represents a competitive advantage at a time of accelerated change.

  • My Role: Conducted qualitative research & collaborated with research team to identify insights & opportunities, design principles.

• Unified Independent Agent Digital Experience - Design Sprint

  • Project Objective: Our partner came to us with three primary objectives:

    • Align stakeholders & leaders on top problems within the current agent experience.

    • Engage stakeholders in new way of working, to increase awareness of and confidence in a new iterative approach to product development.

    • Complete the first two requests within 4 weeks of initial request.

  • Project Outcomes: A 5-day remote, design- sprint based in part on the original Google Design Sprint that took participants from shared understanding of current state, to co-creation of a vision for future state, to identification of top agent problems, and finished with designing prototypes and gathering agent feedback. Our NPS score, derived from an anonymous participant survey, was 71, or “world class” according to Bain, the creator of the NPS index measurement.

  • My Role: Lead point of contact for all partner communication. Designed agenda & facilitated sessions. Created Mural boards, designed & delivered a Design Thinking primer for participants, created summary/ recommended next steps for business partners.

• MSA Post Sales Activities - Research & 3-5 Year Strategy Report

  • Project Objective: Understand, map and record "one source of truth" of current state service processes to inform key decisions made by digital product & customer service teams.

  • Project Outcomes: Identified common processes, created service blueprints and journey maps, determined patterns, and created recommendations for a new 3-5 year growth strategy.

  • My Role: Led research team, conducted analysis, created 3-5 year strategy report.

INNOVATION CATALYST

Coached cross-functional, dedicated teams participating in a 90-day corporate sponsored, innovation accelerator to use a hybrid approach that combined the best principles from Design Thinking, Agile, & Lean Start-up to search for & create delightful, emotionally engaging solutions to customer problems. Objective of the 90-day cohort accelerator was to drive business outcomes while influencing participants through practice and safe experimentation to adopt repeatable, continuous innovation-discovery behaviors. Key results from these efforts include:

• Identifying a primary blocker preventing the company from realizing a multi-million dollar potential savings from customer enrollment in paperless communication.

  • Team presented evidence of the blockers to senior leadership which resulted in emergency budget & resource prioritization approval that led to creating a seamless, online user experience that paved the way for paperless adoption.

• Creating a simplified process to support more effective development conversations between managers and employees resulting in more accurate enterprise talent identification & mobility processes.

  • Team validated a customer and problem within weeks, validated a solution for a single market (a Claims business unit) within a month and then scaled to multiple internal “markets” based on world-of-mouth marketing.

• Discovering the differentiating value of a promising but insufficiently-defined and generously-funded internal start-up.

  • Team identified & validated an important internal customer problem that could be solved with the new channel of delivery in a way that could not easily be copied or repeated.

  • Validation of the customer problem lengthened the internal-startup runway allowing for additional value to be identified and delivered.

Infusionsoft

Service Designer
October, 2015 - October, 2016

Created services that supported the seamless on-boarding of new or consistently inactive customers as well as helped build a culture of design.  Approached this objective by focusing on 2 key functions:

1. Encouraging rapid experimentation through example and education

2. Identifying existing services with the potential for expansion

Intuit

Product Manager
October 2011 – November, 2015

Digital product manager on three unique efforts:

1. Enterprise collaboration & productivity - the tools the global workforce used to communicate and collaborate were extensive and mission critical

2. myIntuit - an internally developed Salesforce app designed to help people leaders take care of the administrative and managerial aspects of their role in one place on one platform

3. Tier 0 HR Support - an HR Services project designed to be the first stop for employees whenever they had HR related questions.

In addition to my role as a product manager I was an innovation catalyst, which is a group of hand selected, highly trained employees responsible for spreading and supporting a design thinking culture.

Anchor Wave

Program Manager
March, 2010 – October, 2011

Managed a six-person cross-functional team; prioritized workload & cleared roadblocks. Collaborated with team members to create personal development plans and performed monthly check-ins to ensure progress toward goals. Acted as the single point of contact for all external client interactions. Set expectations with customers & team for timing of deliverables. Created inspiration boards and set the direction for site design.

• Ensured production tasks were completed on time while meeting or exceeding expectations.

• Managed a portfolio of 25-30 projects at various stages of the product development process.

• Launched 35 custom Wordpress websites and applications in 12-months.

View Anchor Wave slide shows:

• Casino del Sol

• Mexico's Copper Canyon

• Castle & Cooke

Target

Program Manager & Learning Experience Designer

July, 2004 - February, 2009

Program Manager - HR Interaction Design, October, 2006 – March, 2009

Managed programs for an interactive design and development team comprised of 10 designers and developers based in Bangalore, India. Developed processes & operating mechanisms to manage and prioritize the team’s workload.

• First year efforts resulted in a company cost savings of over $1 million.

• Gained executive committee approval to expand the team by 16 team members.

Learning Experience Designer - Organizational Effectiveness, July, 2004 – October, 2006

Designed a training program for the enterprise deployment of the Ariba Procurement suite. Program combined 50 self-paced simulation lessons; instructor led training, real-time performance-support and knowledge management documentation, as well as open labs and guided workshops.

• Received a Corporate Collaboration Award for developing a simplified and unified training program for disparate teams across the organization that came in $50,000 under budget.

View Target slide show

RZ Solutions

Business Analyst & Technical Trainer
January, 2001 – July, 2004

As a certified Cognos and Business Objects Instructor and consultant, developed and facilitated custom curriculum. Gathered and documented business requirements used in the development of data warehouse and reporting systems.

• Traveled extensively throughout the US, Canada, and Latin America for companies such as 3M, Medtronic, Carlson Wagonlit, General Mills, Schneider National, and PepsiCo.

View RZ Solutions slide show

Education

University of Minnesota  - Information Management Systems, Post-Graduate Certification

University of Wisconsin-Madison  - B.S. Education

Interests & Accomplishments

Child & Family Resources, Member, Board of Directors, 2012-2016 (view coaching the staff slide show)

Creative Startups, Guest Faculty

Google Start-up Weekend: Tucson, Winner of 2013 Lean Start-up competition (view Start-up Weekend slide show)

Start-up Tucson, Volunteer, 2013- present

Global Service Design Network, Member since 2017

Technical Acumen

Summary:

• Luma Institute Certified HCD Practitioner & Facilitator

• Intuit trained Innovation Catalyst & design thinking facilitator

• Scrum Project Management, ICAgile Professional Certification, 89-1835-e6b66094-ebf9-4ae2-8bc7-403630027af8

• Service Design Immersive, Cooper, Credential: 13822987

• Proficient in most prototyping, user research, content management, & enterprise collaboration tools including:

  • Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop/Illustrator/XD/Acrobat)

  • Sharepoint 2010/2013

  • Confluence

  • UserZoom.com

  • Mural