B2B Card Payment Reconciliation - Design Sprint

I’ve redacted some detail due to the sensitive nature of this work being under development.

As Head of Design for Commercial Credit Card, I oversaw the execution of this work as it became the number 1 business priority consuming an estimated 70% of technical bandwidth for new feature development.

Setting the stage

In the fall of 2021, I initiated a sprint-style project that brought together various perspectives across the Commercial Design team to push a reconciliation initiative out of discovery and into ideation and execution. The design team already knew the problem - we just didn’t know how those would come together in a single, unified design. Three features need to come together into one product initiative to solve the reconciliation issues identified. I wanted the team to rethink the whole experience —- not just a “feature first” design.

I knew big changes were coming to the design system, UI pattern inconsistencies had been raised during an on-going angular migration, and these three features would touch a lot of the existing platform functionality.

Project plan

I pulled together the one pager project plan that set expectations, deliverables, and timeline for the team before revising with key members and kickoff.

I had checkins with the team at least every other day to debrief, nudge, and provide guidance when they got stuck.

HERE’S HOW IT WAS BROUGHT TO LIFE

The retrospective and team share out

From the very beginning, I made clear that this was an experiment in cross-team collaboration and that the most important aspect of this project was for us to learn from it. Collaboration like this was outside of our norm; a muscle that needed to be exercised. The original project plan stated, “At the end of this, let’s plan an honest, chronological retrospective.” So that’s what we did…and we learned a lot.

Some of the big lessons learned were…

1. Don’t put the new person on an urgent initiative in a complicated project

2. We should’ve spent more time pulling research together prior to kickoff

3. We didn’t spend enough time establishing roles or a specific structure. You need at least one of those.

4. We could’ve brought some trusted product partners in earlier

5. It wasn’t as stressful as people thought … :)

Next steps and outcomes

1. C-suite level presentations and roadshows for momentum and alignment followed.

2. As we started presentations, I immediately shifted the design team towards a visually focused hi-fidelity initiative around the patterns and consistency for table layouts grounded in these use cases. Also known as “Table Stakes”.

3. We’re in the middle of concept validation, hi-fi prototyping, and lots of edge cases.

4. This is now the #1 priority of the business to execute in 2022.