Retirement benefits transformation
A digital transformation for a G7 country’s social development & public benefits department, consisting of planning, implementation, team-building, and coaching across an initial “Digital Lab” around retirement benefits and programs as well as a broader cross-departmental CX initiative.
I was responsible for building and coaching the design team for the lab, coaching the Product Owner for the Lab, and providing guidance to senior leadership around how best to engage with the Lab as well as how to instil CX best practices and approaches across the department. I also served as a capacity booster, contributing to research, design, and testing activities as well as hosting workshops and routine meetings with key stakeholders (legal, ops, policy, programs, IT, etc.). I coached members of the design team continuously for the duration of the project and on an as-requested basis for many months afterwards.
My responsibilities:
Digital Service design
Design coaching & leadership
CX organizational design
Executive coaching
Project length:
21 weeks
13
Total product team size
250k
Unique visitors within first 6 months
15 w
Time from ideation to cross-country launch
87
Possible retirement quiz “actions” for residents
Context
The department is currently facing a punishing demographic shift, given the aging population and changing work behaviours. With the population of seniors (65+) set to grow by 50% in the next 15-20 years and movement away from defined-benefit pensions and lifetime careers, their retirement benefits applications – particularly for means-tested income supports – are expected to grow substantially. Given existing struggles with education, outreach, and enrolment – particularly for rural and remote communities, senior departmental leadership wanted to get ahead of the demographic shift. Looking to emulate the success of other departments, they embarked on a transformation initiative, anchored in a “Lighthouse Lab” that would aim to both showcase a different way of working and deliver compelling new products and services to support the client experience in discovering, applying for, and receiving these public benefits.
Digital Labs
We worked with the department to stand up a “Lighthouse Lab” - a cross-disciplinary team of designers, developers, policy and operational experts, and a host of supporting subject matter experts. This Lab worked in an agile manner to deliver new and improved experiences against one end-to-end client journey. We guided the Lab through several structured phases to simultaneously deliver a working solution and a team capable of operating at steady-state moving forward.
Baselining | 5 weeks
Establish a shared understanding of the current state from three complementary lenses: business, technology/operations, and experience (client & staff).
Key activities
Build the team
Generative user research
Map current state journey, pain-points, processes, and architecture
Assess in-flight initiatives
Develop quantitative and qualitative baseline of the current state journey
Dream & Design | 5 weeks
Imagine and align around an ideal future-state vision for the Journey. Use this to define a ”minimum viable product” (MVP) that can be built in ~12-16 weeks.
Key activities
Define ideal future state (Zero-Based Design Workshop)
Define Minimum Viable Product (Minimum Viable Product Workshop)
Build business case
Identify risks and dependencies
Tech/design tool set-up (Sprint 0)
Delivery | 12 weeks
Deliver a working product that offers immediate value to clients and employees and continuously iterate/ refine it through real-world monitoring.
Key activities
Define backlog and user stories
Conduct testing with clients/users
Bi-weekly, iterative delivery towards Minimum Viable Product
Hold sprint Planning and sprint reviews (demos)
Push product features to production
How I delivered impact
Breaking down siloes: Bridging existing departmental capabilities
While we had been brought in to coach and capability build, the department did in fact have a broad and deep pool of talent already, from skilled product designers to content writers to client service specialists. Most of these skilled people were working in isolation or in small teams that lacked decision-making authority or connections to influence the experience at a system-wide level. I took great care to seek out and connect these disparate resources so that work was not needlessly replicated, insights and best practices could be shared, and efforts could be coordinated for greater impact. Perhaps more importantly, I surfaced and highlighted these strengths and capabilities for senior leadership to help encourage them to reduce the organizational barriers that were holding their own teams back.
Above (left to right): A framework for CX metrics to measure both leading and lagging indicators of CX success; Three distinct organizational paradigms for CX capabilities.
Embedding CX: Changing the broader structure of the organization
Unlike previous transformations, where the focus was exclusively on a new Lab division, capable of executing against programs in isolation, the Lighthouse Lab was merely supposed to demonstrate new ways of working that the entire department sought to adopt. To support the broader transformation and scaling of impact across the organization, I developed workshops and coaching materials for the incoming Head of CX, including:
Defining a cross-organizational CX vision
Linking the vision to value and defining clear CX metrics
Developing and integrating a CX organization into the organization