Project Brief
Develop a modern and high quality application that will solve users pain points, boost their performance and increase the return of investment for the company.
Through user centered design and development processes we aim to increase customer satisfaction through the utility, ease of use, automation that will result in less manual processing and efficiency provided through the interaction with the new application.
Goals
Single Source of Truth
For all the information related to the area
Efficient
To allow the users to perform their daily activities in a timely manner helping them achieve their business goals.
Flexible
From the user’s perspective the app must allow them to view information according to each users needs.
From an engineering perspective the app must be designed in a way that will easily allow future business changes.
Robust Reporting
That will allow the users to slice and dice data to create new reports in a flexible way or run existing canned reports whenever they need to.
Scalable
Ensure the application is designed and developed in a way that can handle a large increase in users, workload or transactions without undue strain.
Auditable
Must keep relevant records to provide documentary evidence of the sequence of activities that have affected at any time a specific operation inside the application.
The Team
The core delivery team included ~30 cross-functional members spanning product ownership, business analysis, architecture, engineering, quality assurance, and design. I served as the principal product and UX design lead, partnering closely with the Product Owner and technical leadership to align roadmap direction, delivery planning, and user experience strategy across the program.
Product Leadership, Strategy & Experience Design
Partnered directly with the Product Owner to define roadmap priorities, plan and sequence releases, and manage backlog evolution for a mission-critical global finance platform. Contributed to feature prioritization, delivery planning, and cross-functional alignment to ensure product decisions balanced business value, technical feasibility, and user impact.
Led end-to-end discovery and user research, translating complex financial workflows and stakeholder requirements into scalable product capabilities and clear interaction models. Defined and drove the overall product and experience strategy, embedding user-centered decision-making throughout planning, design, and delivery.
Owned requirements clarification, stakeholder workshops, and artifact creation necessary to enable efficient engineering execution, including UI guidelines, functional prototypes, and interaction specifications. Facilitated user-story grooming, backlog refinement, and continuous validation in close collaboration with the Product Owner, Scrum Master, Delivery Manager, and technical leads.
Worked closely with engineering and QA throughout development and release cycles to ensure implemented functionality met business intent, usability standards, and quality expectations. Contributed to delivery planning, release readiness, and cross-team coordination across the full product lifecycle.
Research & Analysis
Led the product discovery and research strategy to inform roadmap direction and experience design for a global finance platform. Designed and executed qualitative and quantitative research across international user groups, including surveys, interviews, and workflow analysis, to uncover user needs, behavioral patterns, and operational constraints.
Synthesized research insights into clear product requirements, prioritization inputs, and experience principles that guided feature definition and delivery planning. While initially focused on a specific product initiative, the discovery effort expanded to support the broader Finance Cloud Transformation, informing cross-platform decisions and long-term modernization strategy.
Mapped and documented complex financial business processes to identify pain points, inefficiencies, and opportunity areas, enabling more targeted product improvements and clearer alignment between stakeholder expectations, technical feasibility, and user value.
Scalable Design System & Product Consistency
Defined and implemented a scalable design system to ensure consistency, usability, and efficient feature delivery across the platform. Established reusable interaction patterns, component standards, and experience guidelines that enabled faster design-engineering collaboration and reduced variability across product releases.
Designed the system to support long-term product evolution, allowing visual styling and branding layers to be updated without disrupting underlying interaction logic or development workflows. This flexibility enabled a smooth transition to the firm’s updated brand identity while preserving delivery velocity and product stability.
Since it was a data intensive product it became fundamental to enable the users to manipulate data freely. So the interaction patterns related to data manipulation were carefully defined and tested with the users:
Early Validation & Prototyping
Translated defined user journeys into exploratory wireframes and interactive prototypes to validate product approaches before engineering investment. Developed clickable prototypes for key workflows, enabling early testing with business users and rapid feedback on usability, process clarity, and functional direction.
This early validation reduced downstream rework, accelerated stakeholder alignment, and supported more confident prioritization and delivery planning. Iterative prototyping allowed the team to refine product decisions prior to formal stakeholder reviews and handoff to engineering, improving overall execution efficiency and release readiness.
Key Results
Achieved a 84% score that placed us within the Top 5 of apps within the Firm. Increased team’s collaboration and communication resulting in ~2 hours less spent on back and forths. Increased team’s efficiency by reducing ~5 hours of work per week. Increased app usage and adoption by 20%. Reduced 90% the need of Training Sessions.
Users Feedback after Production Release
"System looks great and quite easy to follow. Very helpful"
“Amazed at all the new functionality the application has over the previous one”
“Amazed and pleased with SSO, searches, real time data, etc”
“The application will be a big help since it gives me all the information I need”
“The new application is GREAT is gives me all that I need and is so easy to use”
“Huge step forward”
“I am amazed”
"Thanks for creating such an excellent tool, with so many useful features and the flexibility to manage the changes that could occur over the next few years as the Firm grows and evolves.”
“Job well done by all!!!!! I LOVE the new application”