Getting the Story Right the First Time

This was the CEO’s sixth and most ambitious company to date. Only a few weeks after assembling the initial executive team, I was brought in to help the company write and design its initial company overview presentation. Somewhat uniquely, since the start-up was self-funded, this presentation was not aimed at investors but at partners—convincing them to join forces with the goal of accelerating the company’s development and launch.

The CEO’s vision for the AI-driven product and mission-driven organization proved extremely ambitious, with a moderate to high level of complexity. I led the executive team through a series of workshops to define the mission, vision, and values of the company as well as its target customers and their various need-states. Using these elements as a foundation, I collaborated with the head of strategy, head of product, and lead scientific officer to tell the story of the company and provide a compelling articulation of how the product would work and the value it would produce for its customers and users.

Given the early nature of this start-up, the narrative went through a significant number of revisions as the founding team evolved and refined their vision for the product and the company as a whole. Once the narrative stabilized, I brought in a design resource to design the final deck, which was also built into a master PowerPoint template for ongoing use.

MY ROLE: Strategist, Writer
OUTPUTS: Corporate / product overview presentation (ppt)

Realigning the Product Narrative to the Mission

A number of years ago, I helped a physical security systems company define who they were and why they mattered. My agency was hired to develop a brand strategy for the company and then went on to design and write the company’s investor deck, website, and several pieces of marketing collateral as well as naming several of their products. With that work as a foundation, the company successfully went public and has been growing well ever since.

Recently, the founding CEO and President reached out to me to help them with a fundamental piece of storytelling for the business. The world has changed a lot since the early days of the company. Originally organized around countering international terrorist threats in the wake of 9/11, the company’s products were extremely well-suited to address the growing threat of domestic extremism and active shooters in public spaces. While the company had modified its product documentation and marketing messages, company leaders felt as though they were missing the inspirational spark that had characterized the articulation of purpose found in the initial brand work I led for them.

I was asked to develop a presentation that would realign and reanimate the company’s story around their current purpose and impact. The primary audience for this narrative at first would simply be the company’s own employees, but the expectation was that eventually, the key elements of this presentation would impact many aspects of the company’s messaging.

After a series of interviews with the founders and an audit of their existing marketing and product content, I developed a presentation that captured the spirit and passion that the founders were looking for. So much so that they asked me to record a voiceover of myself presenting the deck, which they later turned into a video.

MY ROLE: Strategist, Writer
OUTPUTS: Corporate vision presentation framework (ppt), voiceover narration

Building Innovation Into the Brand

Premise Healthcare was the largest and most successful provider of on-site healthcare services to corporate America. However, they found themselves struggling to maintain their market leadership and reputation compared with some flashy new healthcare startups that seemed more innovative and interesting to prospective Premise customers.

I led a small team to do a complete brand strategy and positioning overhaul for the company, driven by consumer, clinician, and customer research. Only the company’s mission was left untouched as we repositioned Premise as a pioneer in the future of corporate healthcare whose every action was focused on a single goal: making healthcare effortless.

Based on this new strategy and positioning, we refreshed the company’s logo and built out a corporate identity system that we then extended to collateral, advertising, and the corporate website. The CEO was so pleased with both the strategic and design work that he subsequently hired us to reimagine the physical and service experience of the company’s onsite clinics.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, Brand Strategist
OUTPUTS: Brand strategy, copywriting, visual identity system refresh and extension, brand guidelines, collateral, digital brand assets, corporate website redesign, service design, interior space design

Designing a Bigger Tent for Wine Drinkers

For many people, finding a bottle of wine is as easy as grabbing something interesting off the supermarket shelf. But for those who care enough about wine to look for something more specific, navigating the endless options in the world of e-commerce proves to be a long-tail nightmare. While there are successful wine e-commerce sites, even the biggest only offers the tiniest slice of what is actually available for purchase online.

Pix was founded to create the world’s largest wine marketplace, connecting motivated wine buyers with the thousands of retailers and producers around the world who have bottles of wine to sell. I was originally asked to join the board of advisors for this angel-funded start-up, but in my bi-weekly conversations with the CEO it became clear that the company needed design and brand leadership in addition to the digital product design and product-market-fit guidance I was already providing.

I stepped in to run a brand strategy engagement for the company, creating a brand architecture that helped define who the company was, why it mattered, who its target customers were going to be, and the nature of the value it would provide to those customers. I then led a naming engagement with a naming company and sourced an identity designer whom I directed through the effort of designing the company’s logo.

At the same time, I assembled a team of UX and UI designers to perform discovery research with consumers that informed the UX and UI design for the MVP release. Throughout, I worked closely with the CEO, the COO, the Chief Content Officer, the CTO, and a subsequently hired VP of Product.

MY ROLE: Board Advisor, Brand Strategist, Design Lead
OUTPUTS: Brand strategy, naming, identity design, UX design (screen map, process flows, wireframes, prototype), UI design

Sorting Out Complex Services

One of the world’s largest and most prominent Consumer Packaged Goods companies spent years developing a vast array of sophisticated services to offer its retailer customers across varied industries and global regions.

These services ranged from providing advice on product mix, analyzing store layouts for efficiency, pricing analysis, consumer demographic research, and more. All these useful services were loosely grouped under a single organization, but lacked a clear taxonomy and value proposition.

I was brought in by a friend’s agency to lead the exercise I ended up calling a “service ecosystem rationalization.” I also partnered with another lead strategist to develop value proposition messaging and a positioning strategy. Based on stakeholder research across 20 different countries we sorted, reorganized, rationalized, de-duplicated, and renamed more than 130 different services and solutions, ultimately grouping them into four key service areas, each clearly named and described.

These service offerings were then communicated in an overall value proposition narrative and positioning strategy that allowed this organization to powerfully explain both internally and externally what it did and what value it delivered.

MY ROLE: Lead Strategist
OUTPUTS: Product and solution taxonomy, value proposition, positioning strategy

Imagine the Experience Devs Desire

It didn’t quite seem real at first. “We’re running a contest to re-imagine the experience of being a Company X software engineer” read the e-mail from one of Silicon Valley’s largest and most famous tech companies. Initiated by the company’s facilities and operations group in conjunction with their global architecture firm, this contest asked selected agencies to present a vision for a re-imagined software engineering employee experience from soup to nuts. Hidden beneath the playful ask was a deadly serious question.

Company X was experiencing the lowest job satisfaction rates and highest turnover among engineers it had ever seen, despite investing billions in facilities, benefits, and various workplace offerings. It needed to figure out how to improve the dat-to-day engineer work experience, and fast.

Once we determined that this wasn’t some prank, we dove in head-first. I led a small team that spent time interviewing software engineers at various large tech companies to better understand their daily work experience in-context, which fed our brainstorming for what an ideal software engineer’s work experience might be like, from the moment their alarm went off in the morning to when they finally turned out the lights at night.

We re-imagined or improved every aspect of the dev work experience we could think of, from the commute to the organization of team spaces, to how meetings were run, to how daily interactions between team members might occur. The final product was a scenario-based day-in-the-life narrative illustrated with sketches, diagrams, designs, and illustrations painting a picture of a new kind of software developer work experience that lived at the intersection of control, connectivity (to many things), and impact.

We won the contest, got a check for our efforts, and designed several projects for them to execute as a result. Of course, the pandemic would go on to reshape the engineer work experience even more than we thought was possible.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, Lead Strategist, Lead Writer
OUTPUTS: Vision presentation

Customer Experience On a Chip

Like most of the major semiconductor manufacturers, Company Y was in the midst of significant change, dealing with the rise of mobile technologies and the complex landscape of the Internet of Things. What’s more the founding CEO had stepped away and put a new leader in place, tasked with transforming and leading the company into a new stage of growth. This new CEO and his relatively new CMO both believed firmly in the competitive power of a great customer experience. They asked me and my team to help them answer some very fundamental questions: who are our different types customers, what needs do they really have, and how well are we serving those needs today? While those are straightforward questions, answering them for a massive semiconductor company with customers around the globe was no small task.

We conducted dozens of stakeholder interviews across 18 countries and several markets. We then conducted nearly 80 customer interviews in more than 15 different countries over many months. The massive amount of data we gathered was synthesized into customer personas and customer journeys, with the express goal of identifying peaks, pits, and potholes in the customer experience. Peaks are high points where a company delivers a great experience. Pits are places where customers are let down significantly, and potholes are bumps in the road that individually aren’t too damaging, but too many can become problematic.

Through a series of collaborative workshops with participants from many divisions of the company, we developed plans to amplify the peaks, remove the pits, and fill in the potholes along the customers’ journeys, and developed a 2-year roadmap of initiatives that the organization immediately began work on. Some were projects that we could help with, such as a redesigned corporate website, improved product collateral, cultural training focused on customer experience, and improving the company’s Voice of the Customer program.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, Customer Experience Strategist, Researcher
OUTPUTS: Customer personas; customer journeys with peaks, pits, and potholes; company culture analysis; ideal customer experience vision; stragic initiatives roadmap

Reinventing Tuxedo Rental

When celebrity businessman George Zimmer decided to get back in the game after being pushed out of the company he founded, he wanted to do it in style. Black-tie style. Armed with nothing more than a legal pad and enough financing to make it happen, Zimmer walked into my office and asked my team to help him conceptualize, name, design, and launch a world-class online formal-wear rental service.

Based on deep consumer research, we developed the brand strategy for the venture, named it, and took Zimmer and his team on a participatory design journey with constant input from the key customers that would be using the service: brides, grooms, and wedding planners.

In conjunction with the operations team and a set of expert tailors, we architected a shopping, self-measurement, and event management experience that streamlined the process of renting formal wear. The site featured an innovative guided self-measurement process, an interactive style exploration tool, and a comprehensive dashboard that allowed responsible parties to track and manage the rental process for an entire wedding party.

The site launched with industry leading conversion rates right out of the gate.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, UX Team Lead
OUTPUTS: Customer research, brand strategy, naming, UX design (site map, process flows, wireframes), instructional copy, visual design explorations, UI screen designs, lifestyle photo shoots, usability testing

Learning How to Talk to Electricians

One of Europe’s largest players in SmartHome technology had its eyes on the US as a market for its leading home automation system, but knew that selling into the American market was going to be very different than what they were used to in Europe. They asked me and my team to help them understand the mental models of their target customers, electricians and electrical contractors, and explore how they might think about integrating this company’s products into their offerings. We conducted a qualitative in-context research project, spending time with electricians and technology-savvy DIYers to better understand how they thought about home automation solutions. We also demonstrated the client’s solution and gathered direct feedback on it from potential customers. Our rich insights allowed us to develop strategic positioning and messaging for the product launch, which drove the creation of marketing assets, as well as training assets for the company’s distribution partners. We went on to design a web site and collateral for the product launch.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, Researcher, Strategist, UX Lead
OUTPUTS: Customer research, positioning strategy, messaging strategy, UX design (site map, process flows, wireframes), visual design explorations, UI screen designs, collateral design

The Robotics Brand Story

What happens when you’re one of the most sophisticated robotics companies in the world, but your first product just happens to be a toy? Everyone thinks you’re a toy company, even most of your employees.

Though we were first brought in to design their e-commerce website, Anki asked my team and I to help them solve their brand problem: making sure they were thought of first and foremost as a robotics company. The brand strategy we developed and then expressed in the form of a brand book helped the company articulate its story and value proposition clearly for the first time, and laid the foundation for Anki’s expansion beyond its initial product offering. My team and I became trusted partners, with multiple projects executed over several years.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, Brand Strategist, UX Team Lead
OUTPUTS: Brand strategy, printed brand book, website UX design (site map, process flows, wireframes), visual design explorations, UI screen designs, front-end code, DRUPAL integration

Mind the Mattress Gap

Tempur-Sealy is one of America’s leading mattress manufacturers, but like many traditional manufacturers in most industries, their products are primarily sold to consumers through retailers they don’t control. With the rise of mattress-in-a-box products, Tempur saw the need to better educate consumers on the qualities of their various mattress brands, and to do so in a way that didn’t rely on (sometimes inattentive or just plain unavailable) salespeople in mattress showrooms.

We designed an entire omnichannel service experience that began at home or on the go, led into an in-store experience, and followed up after the visit. The core of the solution involved an AR-inspired web-based mobile phone experience designed to guide consumers through the mattress shopping experience. Overlaying infographics and storytelling on mattresses we helped mattress shoppers understand the differences between different mattress types and guided them, step-by-step through how to evaluate the feel and fit of a mattress to their needs.

Our project was rolled out to dozens of stores around the country and celebrated as one of the company’s most innovative and effective consumer-facing sales enhancement efforts.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, UX Team Lead
OUTPUTS: Service experience design, mobile web UX design (screen map, process flows, wireframes), visual design explorations, UI screen designs, copywriting, usability testing, full-stack technology development, deployment, and maintenance.

Welcoming Young Tech Workers Home

Prometheus Apartments is one of the largest owners and developers of luxury apartment buildings in the country, and the single largest owner of multi-family properties in the Bay Area. Prometheus crafts exceptional apartment living experiences, but needed help expressing the magic of their neighborhoods online, and especially wanted to improve the usability of their apartment search tools. My team and I were hired for a complete website overhaul.

Figuring out how to express the uniqueness of Prometheus’ neighbor experience suggested in-context research, which we conducted at a number of their sites in the Bay Area. This research crystallized the nature of the brand experience that we needed to embody on the web site, shaping the design, interactivity, and copywriting for the web site, which eventually won several design awards and dramatically improved conversions.

MY ROLE: Engagement lead, UX Team Lead
OUTPUTS: Brand strategy, experience research, UX design (screen map, process flows, wireframes), UI design, copywriting, custom CMS build and deployment, full-stack development, launch and maintenance

Speaking the Value of American Craftsmanship

Dennis and Denise Blankemeyer are childhood sweetharts who started a tiny furniture manufacturing business in rural Ohio that has become one of the darlings of contemporary restaurant design. Crow Works supplies gorgeously designed, American-sourced and American-made commercial furniture for everyone from Starbucks to Michelin Three-Star restaurants.

Despite being a visionary-led and mission-driven organization, the company was having a hard time articulating who they were and why they mattered—primarily to themselves and their employees, but also to the outside world. They came to me and my team asking for brand strategy and messaging strategy.

Based on extensive interviews with employees and customers, working directly with the two founders, I led a brand strategy engagement that helped the company “say what we mean but couldn’t figure out how to say.” Our brand strategy work helped the company position itself for its next stage of growth.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, Brand Strategist
OUTPUTS: Brand strategy, messaging strategy

Power (and Money) to the People

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) wanted to put the power of wealth management into the hands of the individual investor. To this end, they created a skunk-works company within a company with a veteran leader brought in from Silicon Valley to lead the effort.

This CEO enlisted me and my team to create a new digital product called MyWealth, a completely self-directed wealth management platform, unprecedented in the Australian market. By combining our understanding of the CBA brand proposition, our deep experience in digital product UX design, and our knowledge of core underlying bank systems and technologies, we designed and launched the MyWealth platform, an interactive web and mobile experience that removed confusing barriers, eliminated financial jargon, and simplified interfaces and tools to create confidence in consumers many of whom would be manging their investments for the first time.

The product was used by tens of thousands of customers, with tens of millions of assets under management, and supported thousands of daily transactions.

MY ROLE: UX Team Lead
OUTPUTS: Service experience design, mobile web UX design (screen map, process flows, wireframes), visual design explorations, UI screen designs, copywriting, full-stack technology development, deployment, and maintenance.

Putting the Smarts in the Smart Grid

Many consumers in the U.S. have an electrical SmartMeter in their home built by Silver Spring Networks, who also provide a large portion of the infrastructure that comprises the growing Smart Grid powering America’s homes and businesses. In addition to providing this infrastructure, Silver Spring Networks also offers value-added services to its utility customers, including a consumer-facing energy portal known as CustomerIQ.

I led a team that designed CustomerIQ to allow homeowners to easily understand their energy bills and make better decisions about how and when they use power. Our solution involved customer-centric displays of information that simplified the complexities of utlility rate plans and drove action when there were opportunities for customers to save money through switching plans or changing their electricity usage habits.

The U.S. Department of Energy called this redesigned portal “The best demand response solution we have ever seen” and it saved one of Silver Spring Network’s customers over $3M in the first year of deployment.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, UX Team Lead
OUTPUTS: Requirements definition, UX design (site map, process flows, wireframes), visual design explorations, UI screen designs.

Making Portfolio Accounting Work for Users

Portfolio accounting software used by the world’s top financial services firms is by necessity, complex. Advent Software became one of the world’s leaders in financial services tools by offering sophisticated solutions to a wide range of customers and industries.

As part of moving its entire software infrastructure to the cloud, Advent asked me and my team to redesign their entire digital product platform, from core common services to specialized tools such as counterparty reconciliation and portfolio rebalancing. In addition to complex user experience and visual design for these tools, based on qualitative user research findings, we also provided significant technology development assistance, beginning with complex user interface coding and eventually extending back into the data architecture.

The result was a modernized product suite that supported all modern devices and browsers with a consumer-grade product experience - a first in its category for portfolio accounting solutions. Advent was acquired not long after the launch of our work.

MY ROLE: Engagement Lead, UX Team Lead
OUTPUTS: Customer research, participatory design, UX design (screen map, process flows, wireframes), visual design explorations, UI screen designs, complex front-end development, data architecture consulting