Challenge
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Approach & Solution
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Results
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Challenge
Recently, a private equity-funded retail extended service contract provider facing disruption from a digitally-savvy new entrant engaged us to perform a competitive customer experience benchmarking study, including contextual inquiry, and design a future state service model that allows the client to leapfrog it's competitors' customer experience.

Approach
In order to identify customer pain points and unmet needs, we examined segmentation data to identify customer archetypes of focus and then conducted ethnographic research, performed heuristic assessments of each channel (in-store, contact center, web, social, and mobile), and quantitatively analyzed complaint verbatims. Next, we developed personas and documented the current state in journey maps highlighting opportunities for innovation. Leveraging the results of our research, we facilitated our stakeholders and sponsors through an innovation workshop to design the future state omnichannel experience. Finally, we worked with the client to detail the people, process, and technology capabilities required to enable the future-state, conducted a gap analysis, and developed a roadmap to guide implementation of the new capabilities.

Solution
Shown here is a quick, <5 minute mockup I created during a meeting with our client-side executive sponsor to ensure that we were accurately understanding a potential concept they were describing.

I was lead business designer and strategist for a web redesign engagement for Banco de Credito del Peru (BCP). BCP realized that despite their leading market share and 125 years of history, foreign banks were muscling in to the local market and in many cases were deploying world-class digital customer service, therefore becoming a compelling choice for the local banked population. In order to provide a seamless experience in the web channel we were engaged to understand customer needs and provide a differentiated homebanking website that drives business value.

Here I oversaw the business strategy workstream which entailed conducting a competitive audit, serving as advocates for customers while ensuring creative assets aligned with key performance indicators, enabling the client to implement new business processes, and developing a quantitative business case. My other roles included workshop facilitation and rapid prototyping.

BCP produced this video to introduce the new ViaBCP, their hombanking portal that my team designed, the homepage of which is shown here.

Agentic AI for Public Relations

Challenge
The media outreach process is time-consuming and fragmented. Whether you're a founder, marketer, or media strategist, crafting personalized, high-quality pitches and identifying the right journalists often involves juggling multiple disconnected tools and a significant investment of time.

Approach
AstraMedia began as an AI-powered pitch assistant and is rapidly evolving into a comprehensive platform for intelligent media engagement. At its core is a Retrieval-Augmented Generation engine that combines live news signals, journalist targeting, and advanced AI-driven writing assistance leveraging multiple AI models.

Solution
I architected and built AstraMedia primarily as the sole designer, developer, and engineer, sharing architect responsibilities with one other collaborator. The platform’s modular Python and Flask backend is designed for flexibility and scalability. It uses a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system to dynamically pull relevant news articles and journalist data via APIs and web scraping, providing timely, context-rich inputs for pitch generation.

AstraMedia employs agentic AI, intelligent agents capable of autonomously gathering information, reasoning over data, and iteratively refining outputs without constant user intervention, enabling proactive, context-aware pitch creation.

I engineered a multi-model AI pipeline integrating a diverse set of language and domain-specific models, including OpenAI’s GPT series, custom fine-tuned transformers, and specialized AI models from various providers to optimize generation and editing workflows. This hybrid approach ensures robustness, adaptability, and best-in-class performance with flexible fallback options.

The journalist discovery engine combines scraper-based data aggregation with keyword matching and clustering algorithms to surface high-value reporters tailored to each campaign. A lightweight feedback loop continuously learns from pitch outcomes and journalist responses, fine-tuning prompt templates and model parameters to improve relevance and engagement.

Security best practices, including secure API key management and strict data privacy controls, are embedded throughout the architecture to safeguard sensitive campaign data. This end-to-end engineering foundation supports both manual and AI-driven workflows, empowering users to generate, refine, and send targeted media outreach efficiently.

Results
Early users report saving hours per campaign while increasing journalist engagement through better relevance and tone matching. AstraMedia is positioned to become a leading media productivity platform that supports the full lifecycle of strategic storytelling for founders, PR professionals, and journalists alike.

Learn more at astramedia.app

White Glove Employee Experience

Challenge
Half a billion dollars was the size of the prize when a leading alternative investment firm was looking to outsource non-core activities across facilities, HR, IT, and finance & accounting while retaining and enhancing the high-touch model that made them such an attractive employer. Complicating this challenge was the desire to achieve economies of scale where personal relationships have historically driven getting things done for this client.

Approach & Solution
The team leading this pursuit, intended to result in a joint venture to provide these services on an outsourced basis to both the client/JV partner firm as well as similar alternative investment managers, brought me in to lead the design of the future state employee experience, leveraging technology to provide world-class, white glove service to employees while retaining the ability to scale. Design research was crucial here, given the client's unique culture, approaches to conducting business, and their emphasis on radical transparency. This work resulted in identification of multiple employee journeys spanning recruitment and initial awareness of the client as a potential employer through to retirement and beyond, focused on their interactions getting help with facilities management, hiring and onboarding, IT support, and more. As a service designer, I also worked with the team and the client to identify and illustrate the back end processes, organizational elements, and technology required to enable this front-end experience vision, as illustrated via a suite of journey maps and service blueprints.

Discrete innovations comprising these journeys included:

• An Apple Genius Bar-type lounge where employees could get assistance ranging from booking conference rooms and arranging for meeting catering, setting up new laptops and smartphones, and even to budgeting and procurement.
• A self-service technology vending machine allowing employees to get new computer peripherals, chargers, and more with a swipe of their employee ID card.
• A Siri-like app and voice interface, called Anthony, empowering employees to get assista`nce via self-service with little effort expended. A comp of this Anthony interface that I designed is shown here.
• A robotic video interview tool to perform initial candidate screening resulting in reduced employee turnover and regrettable attrition - key pain points for the client

Results
Ultimately, we were awarded the work, beating out much more well-known competitors. I stayed on this effort part-time to guide iterative service design and omnichannel experience visioning in the outsourcing transition phase. It is planned that I will serve as Chief Innovation Officer post-go live with responsibility for continuous needfinding, innovation, and design strategy and execution to ensure that interactions with enabling functions always surprise and delight every employee.

Challenge
I was recently engaged by a Fortune 100 consumer products firm to help them fix their Procure to Pay (P2P) processes using design. My client was struggling to pay vendors on time despite unilaterally imposing Net 120 Day payment terms on all it's suppliers and wondered whether accounts payable (AP) processes were the culprit. Rather than taking a traditional, Lean Six Sigma approach to solving this challenge, we combined these quantitative methods with design thinking to ensure that the needs of all involved users will be met. I led this engagement including overseeing the work of multiple business analysts and functional SMEs as well as managing the client relationship.

Approach & Solution
Shortly after kicking off this effort, user research indicated that upstream processes, amounting to the entirety of P2P, must be considered in order to reach a successful conclusion. I negotiated with the client to expand our scope and then extended our user research efforts across P2P to cover external vendors, internal buyers and requisitioners (those that require goods and services), through to the AP team. User research resulted in development of user personas and a summary of opportunities to improve and innovate which were presented to client stakeholders and sponsor users in a design thinking workshop. I subsequently facilitated participants through building user empathy, generating, prioritizing, and selecting the most promising ideas, and finally describing these impactful and feasible ideas via concepts that would solve our users pain and help ensure that vendors get paid on time, every time.

Next, while I worked to illustrate this aspirational future state through a suite of user journey and process maps, my team of SMEs and analysts aligned our concepts to business value to create a prioritized and phased implementation roadmap. Appearing first on the roadmap is a multi-sided portal in which vendors can create and submit compliant invoices, recieve orders, track payment progress, and get help while requisitioners can view vendor product and service offerings, get help in selecting the correct offering, place orders, and create purchase orders. Collaborating with our vendor and requisitioner sponsor users, I conducted card sorts, sketched and reviewed alternatives, and ultimately created a 17 screen clickable wireframe mockup, of which the vendor home page is shown here.

Results
While this project has only just concluded, implementation of our recommendations, spanning people, process, and technology, is underway and we expect the results to include reduction of non-digital invoice submission to 16%, improvement of OCR accuracy by 59.5%, and growth in automated invoice processing first pass yield of 58%.

Challenge
My client, a large global insurance and financial services firm, has continually focused on on improving the employee digital experience, with the goal of measurably increasing satisfaction, engagement, and retention, as well as productivity, innovation, and business results. Seamless and efficient HR transactions are a key component of the their employee digital experience, spanning a wide range of touch points — including onboarding, learning and development, life events, and movement through the business. I served as program manager for a number of efforts supporting this client's employee experience transformation, including a project to redesign the onboarding experience for new hires and their hiring managers.

Approach
We began the New Hire Onboarding project with user research and learned that many employees find current processes to be confusing and complex. Some even likened the process to a Rube Goldberg comic. Diving in deeper, my team consisting of a UX designer, a copywriter, and a business analyst, learned that:

These findings, coupled with the fact that...

"[our research shows that] across firms, new joiners’ experience during the first month has a disproportionate impact on their decision to stay or leave."
Susan Steele, Executive Partner, IBM Global Business Services

...indicated that an opportunity exists to empower managers to support new hires with a consistently great experience. We moved forward through ideation and illustration of a number of potential concepts to re-envison and simplify the onboarding process resulting in a new experience that engages new hires early, streamlines a hiring manager’s onboarding activities and uses crowdsourced mentoring to develop a sense of community.

Solution
Shown here is one of the screens that my team and I designed as part of the new onboarding experience. After reviewing the prototype comprised of these screens with the client, hiring managers, and new hires, we were able to deliver a proposal for the next phase, iteration on this concept resulting in detailed UX design and agile development of the new hiring and onboarding experience.

Challenge
For a Fortune 15 Telecom client, I was engagement lead and creative director for an effort to simplify their omnichannel contact center agent desktop experience. Customer service and tech support agents interacting with clients via telephone, web chat, email, and social media were encumbered by a desktop featuring upwards of 10 running applications comprising 15-20 open windows at a time. Agents spent much of their time remembering how to accomplish tasks and where to find needed information, in fact, we found that due to a lack of effective tools, up to 20% of agent time can be spent looking for information.^{2 (opens in new tab)}

Approach
My team, consisting of a business strategist, a user researcher, two UX designers, a visual designer, a technical architect, and a contact center SME, dove into user research and found that agents relied on many work arounds such as notepads and pens, sticky note reminders on their desks, and good old-fashioned four function calculators in order to best serve customers. Our call to action became "How might we reduce the cognitive load on agents in order to enable them to focus on providing world class customer service?"

Moving forward into a co-creation workshop in which my team, client executives, contact center agents, and front line supervisors ideated, prioritized, and paper prototyped our desired future state, the team then moved forward into iteratively designing a high fidelity prototype of the aspirational desktop agent experience, checking back with our sponsor users periodically to gain feedback towards the next iteration. Simultaneously, we mapped out the to-be processes enabling our future state experience and captured these in a service blueprint that overlays the future state customer and agent experience with the necessary process steps, desktop screens, and back-end systems necessary to enable our vision.

Solution & Results
In the course of developing our "Vision Blueprint," a beautifully printed and bound book describing the end to end effort, capturing all of our deliverables and recommendations to include UI specifications, user stories, and to-be technical architecture to hasten the subsequent agile development phase as well as static images of our clickable prototype, the team and I developed a patent-pending concept we call Contextual Assistance. Contextual Assistance marries the concept of guided flows with machine learning, advanced analytics-powered next best action and cognitive computing as well as cutting edge User Experience Design principles to create a new model for dynamic and modular workflow guidance. The Contextual Assistance concept became ingrained throughout our prototype and represents an exciting aproach with the potential to reinvent contact center interactions.

We later prepared a white paper describing Contextual Assistance as it has become a key differentiating offering.

Challenge
For a Fortune 15 Telecom client, I was engagement lead and creative director for an effort to simplify their omnichannel contact center agent desktop experience. Customer service and tech support agents interacting with clients via telephone, web chat, email, and social media were encumbered by a desktop featuring upwards of 10 running applications comprising 15-20 open windows at a time. Agents spent much of their time remembering how to accomplish tasks and where to find needed information, in fact, we found that due to a lack of effective tools, up to 20% of agent time can be spent looking for information.^{2 (opens in new tab)}

Approach
My team, consisting of a business strategist, a user researcher, two UX designers, a visual designer, a technical architect, and a contact center SME, dove into user research and found that agents relied on many work arounds such as notepads and pens, sticky note reminders on their desks, and good old-fashioned four function calculators in order to best serve customers. Our call to action became "How might we reduce the cognitive load on agents in order to enable them to focus on providing world class customer service?"

Moving forward into a co-creation workshop in which my team, client executives, contact center agents, and front line supervisors ideated, prioritized, and paper prototyped our desired future state, the team then moved forward into iteratively designing a high fidelity prototype of the aspirational desktop agent experience, checking back with our sponsor users periodically to gain feedback towards the next iteration. Simultaneously, we mapped out the to-be processes enabling our future state experience and captured these in a service blueprint that overlays the future state customer and agent experience with the necessary process steps, desktop screens, and back-end systems necessary to enable our vision.

Solution & ResultsIn the course of developing our "Vision Blueprint," a beautifully printed and bound book describing the end to end effort, capturing all of our deliverables and recommendations to include UI specifications, user stories, and to-be technical architecture to hasten the subsequent agile development phase as well as static images of our clickable prototype, the team and I developed a patent-pending concept we call Contextual Assistance. Contextual Assistance marries the concept of guided flows with machine learning, advanced analytics-powered next best action and cognitive computing as well as cutting edge User Experience Design principles to create a new model for dynamic and modular workflow guidance. The Contextual Assistance concept became ingrained throughout our prototype and represents an exciting aproach with the potential to reinvent contact center interactions.

We later prepared a white paper describing Contextual Assistance as it has become a key differentiating offering.

Challenge
A long-time HR Tech incumbent had charged their corporate venture capital group with finding approaches to establishing one-on-one relationships with their enterprise customers’ employees towards growing revenue by selling products and solutions directly to these consumers. In addition to sourcing potential startups to target for venture investments, leadership also wanted to try building new, adjacent, and possibly disruptive businesses to meet these goals and aimed to set up a corporate venture/startup studio.

Approach & Solution
I was brought in to construct and implement a venture design and build methodology for this client’s new startup studio, lead a few initial opportunities and concepts through the venture design phase, and to advise and coach product teams through the venture build phase.

After an extensive analysis of current approaches to product design at the firm including stakeholder interviews and gaining buy-in from across the organization, I aligned their needs and culture with best practices in corporate venture development to create and deploy an end-to-end process that would be successful given the unique cultural and political considerations that the client faced. I then educated the team, including core team members as well as SMEs from across the ~60,000-person business, on this new methodology, which integrates human centered design with lean startup and agile delivery principles, and continued transformation management activities by creating, from scratch, an internal website that served to promote the new studio and it’s approach by illustrating it’s value as well as educating employees on the new process.

While beginning to build an exhaustive idea engine and opportunity backlog, it was time to pilot the bespoke methodology. I formed and led a team through the venture design process for an existing idea to help those who recently lost their jobs get back on their feet professionally, financially, and emotionally – an incredibly salient need given the recent emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately called GuideSmart™, the intent was to guide the newly unemployed through everything from figuring out what to do about health insurance to finding mental health support and through to landing their next job via articles, advice, templates, and rich interaction tools. A screenshot of the landing page smoke test used to validate the market for GuideSmart™ is shown above. Simultaneously, I began coaching a team that had already begun to build (notably, in the absence of a user research-influenced process) another new venture helping “active-agers” (recent but energetic and bored retirees) find work that fits their new schedules. Additionally, I led venture design for another concept that continues today as a banking product allowing workers to get paid up to two days early, earn rewards, spend, plan, and save.

Results
It’s time for honesty: venture design and development requires that we celebrate failure in order to enable successes. In this case, while we saw successes and gained significant validated learning, we also saw failure. In-market validation for GuideSmart™ did not succeed and the decision was made to drop this particular opportunity and build the features focused on job search, application, and interviewing into the active-ager product. Check out what's left of GuideSmart™ here on the Facebook.

Soon after, executive leadership decided to pivot the active ager product to serve as a job search and attainment product aimed at all job seekers, not just retirees. This product perseveres today and enjoys a Domain Authority score of 86 with over 74k backlinks, quite impressive for a startup less than a year old, especially given that Monster.com, a key competitor that has been in the market for over 22 years, scores an 88 with less than 33K backlinks while Indeed.com, possibly the market's leader, scores a 91.^{3 (opens in new tab)}

Update! Upon further reflection, executive leadership decided to create AI tools for what was then called GuideSmart™ and released the product as Brightjump®. Brightjump® has since won the Most Innovative Product award in Brazil, where the AI development lab is located.