VMLY&R Old Mutual

Role: Experience Director
Team: 3 teams; 3 Leads, 9 UX Designers, 5 FEDs.

Background: As the Experience Director, I led multiple teams across three streams of delivery. Transforming an entire business process from paper and old terminal software to end-to-end digital experience.

Duration: 1 Year, 6 Months

Leadership Playbook: Manage all team members' performance, coach them to grow & scale their impact. Operationalize multiple projects and teams - across three businesses. Stakeholder & partnerships with internal cross-functional team, and external 3rd party vendors alongside client management.

Problem Statement

Old mutual is a global financial group of 75 years, and their ways of doing business - just as old. This resulted in a brand stigma that started to impact their bottom line. Globally their advisors were still operating on paper, having to translate notes into a tool after meeting clients every day. This was costing advisors and their clients time, unnecessarily.

Project Context

Scope

Old Mutual was split into Sales and Service. Each section comprising of multiple sub teams. I was accountable for all of Sales, three sub-teams of Quote, Product Recommendations, & Application. The Scope was EVERYTHING, this would be a full re-platform effort.

And would need to connect to the experience built by Service, which I later took accountability of as well.

Metrics of Success

Reduce Sales cycles turnaround by 60%, from 24hours.

Reduce Claims processing by 50% from 48hours

Reduce Risks assessment by 65% from 2weeks

Desired Outcome

This re-platform needed to re-establish Old Mutual as the market leader.

More tangibly, our goal as an agency was to re-imagine how Old Mutual did business by first understanding the inner working, then simplifying processes, establishing a scalable design system, and build an end-to-end experience that would maximize efficiency for advisors and their clients.

Endless Paperwork, no efficiency

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CHALLENGES

Managing 61 000 use stories with clients is a tall order for any team. Reviewing 2000 wireframes is just as challenging.
Being in-house with Clients meant we could work efficiently, but the would also naturally start adapting to their culture.

UX needs to preemptively build deep rationale for all decisions.
Business acumen should be considered within role expectations for leveling Designers.

KEY LEARNINGS

My Accountability

Delivery

My counterpart, Director or Product and I would manage our teams according to priority and timelines, aligned every week to the business goals, and expectations we set with our Clients.

Quality of Solution

I established a skill matrix for all Sales and Service teams. I established better rituals across streams to ensure we were building towards the same goal.

I took what was just a Style guide, and a start of a flat Design System & scaled it to map behavioural components that the backend teams to plug into.

I also ensured Research was required method of measurement.

Stakeholder Management

The Product Director & I were partners in accountable stakeholder communications. I established rituals to build high-trust relationships. Resulting in healthier cross-functional teams.

Explorations

Mapping worst case scenarios enabled my teams to catch edge cases and identify areas in which we could advocate for change by streamlining flows, or changing logic within our clients business model.

This was a ruthless process, built on hundreds of User stories per scenario, whilst closely working with SMEs.

1/5

As a Director, my key responsibilities were ensuring the work gets done according to plan. Ensuring the health of my teams, alongside building a team culture and growing the skill set across the UX teams.
This meant scaling my team's output, to enable designers and developers to prototype more quickly and test on a regular basis. Increasing the quality of our solutions.

2000 Wireframes into Shipped interfaces

The Solution

RESULTS

Quoting Journey cycle

Reduced from 24 hours to 40min.

thats 36 x more efficient