Develop UX Strategy for wealth management platforms

This is a story about how I planned to mature the UX practice in Tegra118 in order to set them up for long term success.

Tegra118 is a provider of software solutions to the wealth and asset management industry with a vast network of broker-dealers, asset managers, and custodians and trading interfaces.

Clients like Wells Fargo, Royal Bank of Canada and others were still using technology exposed to the user via Unix command line interfaces. The organisation wanted to bring all their users onto a new web-based cloud SaaS solution. But like their technology, their UX needed a huge amount of work. With no designers in the organisation they turned to Jigsaw.xyz to help reimagine the platform for the 21^st century.

TIMELINE

2020 - 2021

REPORTS

Product Manager

TOOLS

Miro | UXpin | Figma | React | Confluence

Embarking on a UX transformation project

Tegra118 were undergoing a digital transformation with a plan to update their ways of working and technology stack over the forthcoming 24-months. A few key stakeholders who held the purse strings had realised the strategic value of User Centered Design and the value of methodologies like Lean and Continous Discovery. They're ideas aligned to mine core beliefs and we embarked on a journey of elevating the organisations UX practice from a level 1 Design and Research organisation to mid-level operation.

Current State of UX @ Tegra118

My first task in my journey of developing a strategic plan was to first understand how mature Tegra118's UX was.

Spoiler alert! It was in the bottom rungs, but in any case I did a throughough evaltion of the people, processes, and current state of the products.

I used NNGroup and Jared Spool's UIE maturity stage benchmarks for UX and UXR respectively. Using these well regarded benchmarks made it clear to the stakeholders that this wasn't just an opinion on mine but a widely held understanding of what their practice constituted.

Starting at the top

I had to level up the key stakeholders around what design is and how design works in modern product companies. Emphasising how design is integral to the delivery of products meant explaining basic theory like the Kano model, continous discovery, and the role of Design Thinking in business.

Selling UX

The organisation had no idea how how valuable UX was or how to measure it. I leaned on McKinsey's work on the business value of Design to drive buy-in and then explained how we could measure the impact using both leading and lagging metrics.

A bad workperson blames their tools

A good workperson selects the best tools for the job and masters those tools to get the most out of them.

I'm a big advocate for being tool agnostic, so when I ran my tooling review I wanted to factor in the potential to onboard additional tools, and new tools as they become available. I was concious of budget, and the need to scale as the people in the team did too.

Deliverables

I made a point of talking about the different deliverables that the wider organisation would need to contribute to, mostly conceptual mapping exercises but also things like the front-end effort on the design system. I had to make sure that the stakeholders knew design wasn't just a workshop for UIs but a more strategic capability to help solve customer needs.

People

The team, at the time of writing, consisted of 3 contract designers and myself. Tegra118 needed to understand how to build a capability filled with talent to deliver across the UX spectrum. From content designers to Service Designers, I laid out a framework team structure and details on each role.

Roadmap

All of the ideas, new ways of working, and changes to the organisation's topography had to roll-up into a wider digital transformation project which demanded a roadmap of changes for the next 18-24 months.

I really tried to drive home how the same methods used in Design Thinking should be applied to the delivery of a UX capability. That means being Agile and prioritising learning to steer the growth of the capability.