Making the Financial Industries’ Best Banking App Even Better

Perhaps the most ambiguous problem Tim has been tasked with was to make the best banking app in the industry (JD Power ‘21)…better. Early in Tim’s USAA career, he had the privilege of working with the incredible team responsible for improving the most utilized digital experiences – the main accounts page on web, and the mobile app.

• Partnered closely with the head of Design and Design Director to develop an early project kickoff and alignment workshop.
• Leveraged Facilitation expertise to break down age-old silos across the company, and extracted the top business goals and member pains from each line of business leader, bringing about an unprecedented, unified vision for the project and alignment on a go-to-market strategy for the modernized app experience.
• In under two months, developed and co-facilitated nearly a dozen qualitative and quantitative research efforts to develop baseline metrics for the entire web and mobile app experience. While leading the effort, also coached junior designers about taking a research effort from research plan to synthesis and insight creation.
• Leveraged experience in Design Thinking to lead the team’s shift from research to ideation, guiding the team and development partners through idea vignette creation, collaborative scenario writing and storyboarding, and idea prioritization, resulting in a compelling new vision for a modern app, modernizing old features members loved, while surfacing 30+ new features which could resolve unmet member needs.
• Established key ceremonies with product owners, platform and development partners, and design system peers to collaboratively critique and refine the concepts for user testing.
• Maintained partnership through testing and into development, continuously refining concepts and product roadmaps based on research findings and emergent technical constraints, getting the core app experience to production on time, and flows and documentation for future capability releases delivered ahead of schedule.
• Ultimately, the app modernization efforts to date have led to a 50% reduction in load time, faster task completion times via a simpler navigation experience and personalized quick actions, dramatically fewer crashes due to improved technologies, and countless additional improvements added by partner teams who leveraged the new app framework and experience standards.

Increasing Conversion and Deepening On USAA’s Most Visited Storefront Pages

• Rapidly developed partnerships across design, data, and business in order to build a shared understanding of our knowledge of the space, and data gaps to be resolved.
• Led the process of resolving those knowledge gaps by developing multiple research plans and executing on them, while regularly presenting to the project team and Design Research peers for feedback and improvements to the ongoing plans.
• Effectively combined quantitative data from partners with qualitative data to uncover numerous insights which transcended just the membership page.
• Leveraged this data and influence from partners to make the case for redesigning both the public USAA.com home page, as well as the USAA membership page.
• Leveraged product design experience to quickly generate design options that honored design system standards and components, while connecting back to the unique needs of the page’s visitors that were found in research. Leveraged Journey Maps, IA Diagrams, and User Flow to deeply map out the architecture and test quickly for ease of navigation.
• With the support of junior designers, built out three distinct prototypes in response to three unique hypotheses derived in research.
• Relied heavily on strong partnerships with Design System peers, CMS Platform team, and content partners, to develop Partnered with Design Research peers to establish usability tests in UserZoom, and played the lead role in sharing the results of the tests in a consumable way, to drive rapid decision making on the way forward.
• Post-launch analytics data indicates a significant reduction in task time, increased conversion rates, and increased number of members joining with multiple products.
• Qualitative sentiment indicates a far more intuitive wayfinding experience and a more inspiring and resonant experience for viewers via stories of inspiration and USAA’s differentiated value, all while establishing faster, modern, dynamic platforms behind the scenes.

Facilitating a $30+ Million, Multi Year Strategy to Deliver an Unprecedented Increase in Member Satisfaction

After having facilitated prior vision and strategy development working sessions, Tim was asked to partner with leaders from USAA Enterprise Platforms space to help them respond to a new, unprecedented ask from the CEO: Increase member satisfaction by 10% in the next three years

• Leveraged facilitation and collaboration experience to consult and propose a series of engagements that brought together leaders from not only the Enterprise space, but dependent Lines of Business.
• Aligned Enterprise and Line of Business partners on a shared vision for the effort, and extracted top member needs in their spaces.
• Leveraged Design Thinking expertise to rapidly facilitate a cross-functional workshop that rooted in those member needs, and ideated dozens of new opportunities, resulting in a more balanced portfolio of work, composed of both highly impactful (but harder) satisfaction drivers, and less impactful (but easier) drivers.
• Led the synthesis of outputs from all the working session outputs, leveraging my storytelling experience to create a unifying narrative across both Enterprise and Lines of Businesses, so that executives could drive their funding decisions around broader experiences of work, and not just disparate feature lists.

Fostering a New Vision and Objectives for a New Organization

A major reorganization in late 2021 saw Design moved in the company structure to be more closely aligned with peers in Innovation and Digital Platforms. As a new organization, there was no set Vision or clear Objectives. When the new leader of this organization reached out for help, Tim was asked to help.

• Worked directly with the new Senior Vice President and his leadership team to understand their goals and desired outcomes, and generated creative and interactive activities that were highly resonant and aligned to their goals, in under a week.
• Partnering with his Design Director, facilitated an in-person workshop with multiple leaders of each organization, resulting in simple and effective value statements for the new organization, a shared vision for the opportunities ahead, and a prioritized list of immediate objectives the teams could begin partnering on to both reduce costs across orgs, while driving more impact through their collective value.
• Continued partnering with the leadership team to help them develop a roadmap of prioritized objectives, success measures, and capabilities needed over time.

.Proactively Eliminating a Fundamental Risk to the Team’s Biggest Offering

• Leveraged experience in Design Research, specifically Synthesis, to uncover emergent insights in the coaching data, which indicated that a new means of partnership may be necessary in order to maintain a pulse on Design team needs and how to best support them.
• Exceeded director and executive leader expectations in mitigating abd responding to this looming risk. Tim identified a way to maintain HCD eminence across the organization by fundamentally shifting how the team offered strategic support, moving from the traditional role of a consultant, to a more integrated role.
• Partnered with the Design Director to shape the vision for the program and operationalize it, allocating teammates to become dedicated coaches for specific teams, based on capacity, affinity for the work, and development goals.
• Partnered with Design Director and peer coaches to articulate the vision to Design Leadership, and then the Design organization at large, to tell the story of the revised program.
• Regularly distills insights and trends from monthly coaching data, and presents it quarterly to Design Leadership, enabling them to be more in tune with how teams are driving Human Centered Design and make more informed decisions around allocating support and talent development.

Unexpected Leader and Enterprise Connector

Due to his Design Thinking expertise, Product Design experience, and reputation as a humble teacher and leader, Tim has been trusted by Design leaders to create and lead multiple organization-wide educational programs aimed at providing quality talent development opportunities.

• Developed and managed a three day foundational Design Thinking curriculum for all new Design employees at USAA, over the course of 2.5 years. Partnered closely with HCD team director and Design leadership to align learning objectives to organization needs. Recruited a network of trusted co-facilitators, who Tim recruited and onboarded. Tim led the facilitation of this effort for over two years, leveling up more than 300 Designers across three locations.
• Developed and managed a four week Facilitation Growth Program, increasing the Facilitation skill of 500+ employees across the entire USAA organization. Ownership of the program included evaluating learning objectives against real outcomes, piloting improvements, and scaling the program to new audiences. After ten iterations of the program, successfully codified the offering so that it is now sustained by other peers in the organization, allowing others the chance to develop as program owners and leaders.
• Early 2022, Tim was tasked to partner closely with Corporate Communications leaders to design one of the largest in-house talent development offerings in the history of the company. An attempt to unite distributed workers and provide best practices for working in a hybrid culture. In under one month, Tim and the team recruited over 20 facilitators from multiple parts of the company, scheduled 46 distinct sessions, and ultimately brought together over 1,200 employees to bond and learn new techniques for working together, even when far-removed from one-another.