The short version
- Role
- Director, Experience Design & Creative Direction, partnered with three Chief Product Owners.
- Team
- Inherited 15 designers, grew to 17 (including UX Writers and Design Engineers) across three product trains.
- Timeline
- Prudential, 2024–2026. Full org assessment and restructure in my first 90 days.
- What I owned
- Stabilizing a design org that had lost three leaders in two years: talent, budget, delivery model and the DEM tool.
- Outcome
- +15pt NPS in 12 months. The DEM tool shipped and was adopted org-wide, with a roadmap into 2027.
The mandate was stabilization first — delivery could wait
Prudential's Retirement business had burned through three design leaders in two years. Three large-scale product teams had been forcibly merged, morale was fractured, and the design org had no clear direction, no unified methodology, and no trusted partnership with the product trains it was meant to serve. I was brought in not to lead a design team — but to stabilize one, and rebuild its credibility inside a complex, highly regulated financial organization that had learned to distrust design leadership.
Within 90 days I had evaluated all 15 designers I inherited, reallocated talent across agile pods, established working partnerships with three Chief Product Owners, secured budget for Design and Research, and begun embedding design thinking across three 150+ person product trains. By the end of my tenure, the design org was functioning as a trusted, collaborative partner to the business for the first time — with measurable NPS improvement across all three platforms and an AI-driven automation tool shipped and adopted org-wide.
Three platforms. One fractured design org.
Prudential's Retirement division operates at an enormous scale — three distinct product platforms each serving different segments of the retirement ecosystem:
Retirement Distribution Platform — advisor-facing and consumer distribution tools
Retirement Institutional Platform — products serving institutional clients and plan sponsors
Retirement Salesforce Platform — CRM and sales enablement tools for the Prudential sales force
Three leaders in two years had left these platforms without design continuity. The teams had been restructured, merged, and reorganized before anyone could establish trust or deliver meaningful work. Design was seen as a bottleneck by product, a black box by engineering, and an afterthought by business stakeholders who had been burned by slow delivery and misaligned priorities.
The mandate was an organizational reset, not a product redesign — done at speed, under scrutiny, inside one of the most process-heavy environments in financial services.
The 90-day mandate
I came in as Director of Experience Design and Creative Direction, reporting across a complex stakeholder matrix that included three Chief Product Owners — each leading a 150+ person product train — and senior leaders across Voice of the Customer, ADA Compliance, Legal, Finance, Business Strategy, Engineering, Brand, and Marketing.
My first 90 days were structured as a full organizational assessment:
Team evaluation — All 15 designers assessed for skills, strengths, and current agile pod fit. Determinations made on reallocation, development needs, and where new hires were required to fill capability gaps.
Roadmap alignment — Partnered with three CPOs to understand their 12-month product roadmaps, prioritize design capacity against strategic bets, and build a delivery model that could sustain the pace.
Budget — Established and secured the Design and Research budget required to support three product trains operating in parallel.
Partnership building — Stood up working relationships with Voice of Customer, ADA Compliance, Legal, and Engineering — the cross-functional partnerships design had failed to maintain under previous leadership.
Over my tenure I personally mentored and provided Design Director and Creative Director oversight to a team that grew from 15 to 17 designers — including 2 UX Writers and Design Engineers — embedded across agile pods in all three product trains.
Unify, simplify, partner: the approach
The organizations I inherited weren't broken by bad design. They were broken by organizational fragmentation — teams that didn't trust each other, design practices that weren't legible to product and engineering, and a history of leadership instability that had trained every stakeholder to work around design rather than with it.
Unify first. Before any product work could succeed, the design team needed a shared methodology, a consistent delivery model, and a common language. I introduced design thinking frameworks and agile-compatible research practices that gave the team a way to work that product and engineering could understand, predict, and plan around.
Simplify the model. Three product trains meant three different rhythms, three different stakeholder cultures, and three different definitions of what design was supposed to do. I standardized how design was embedded in agile pods, how design reviews were run, and how handoffs to engineering worked — so the team could scale across all three trains without reinventing the process each time.
Become a trusted partner. The most important deliverable in the first 90 days was a relationship, not a design artifact. I invested heavily in building direct working relationships with each CPO and their product leads. Design credibility in a skeptical organization isn't established by good work alone. It's established by showing up with clarity, meeting commitments, and speaking the language of the business.
PruXpress
Overhauling the operational heart of a $4B annual portfolio
PruXpress is the operational heart of Prudential's retirement annuities business — the platform financial advisors at Prudential and LPL use to manage their full book of business. With a portfolio averaging $4 billion annually, it is one of the most mission-critical internal tools in the organization. I led the redesign of PruXpress to a modern product framework — overhauling the UX for advisors who depend on it daily, improving usability and accessibility, and aligning the platform to Prudential's enterprise design standards without disrupting the workflows of the financial advisors who live in it.
15pt NPS gain across 12 months — the direct result of unified design direction, consistent advisor workflows, and sustained delivery across all three product trains.
Project Elevate
Salesforce Migration · Advisor CRM — Migrated Prudential's legacy Annuities CRM to Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, using the Salesforce Lightning Design System to create an intuitive, modern advisor experience. I led the UX design of the migration — working closely with Engineering, Business Strategy, and Salesforce implementation partners to ensure complex financial workflows translated cleanly to the new platform. The result: faster sales cycles, more intuitive advisor workflows, and a significant reduction in technology overhead and maintenance costs.
The DEM Tool
14 days → 2 minutes. Self-service. No developer required.
Embedded across Prudential's three Retirement product trains was a chronic drag on engineering velocity: ingesting data files. The process was entirely manual — a developer would receive a CSV or Excel file, sanitize it, write it to a dedicated database, and catalog it. Start to finish: one to two full sprints. Fourteen days. Every time.
I partnered with Engineering and Product to design and ship the DEM tool — an AI-driven automation platform that eliminated that process entirely. Post-launch, the same task takes one to two minutes. No developer required. The tool launched as a self-service internal product, available to all audiences across the organization — meaning teams that previously had to submit requests and wait weeks could now process their own data files independently, on demand.
The DEM tool shipped, scaled, and kept growing, with a product roadmap running into 2027. That roadmap existed because the tool worked, the org adopted it, and the business saw enough value to invest in its future.
The biggest AI win here had nothing to do with customers — it was an internal tool that quietly removed a friction point slowing three product trains down at once.
Partnerships that made it work
Design credibility inside a large financial services organization isn't granted — it's built, partnership by partnership. Across my tenure I established and maintained working relationships with every function that touches product:
Voice of the Customer (VoC) — integrating customer insight into the design process across all three product trains
ADA Compliance — embedding accessibility standards into design from the start rather than remediating after launch
Legal & Finance — navigating the regulatory and financial constraints that govern every product decision in a retirement platform
Business Strategy — aligning design priorities to the 12-month product roadmap and longer-term business bets
Engineering — building the trust and shared language that allowed design-to-dev handoffs to work without rework
Brand & Marketing — ensuring all product work stayed in alignment with Prudential's enterprise design system and brand standards
Three calls that reset the org
The call: evaluate every designer before changing anything.
Tradeoff: stabilization first, delivery second, in an org already burned by slow delivery.
Result: all 15 designers assessed and reallocated across pods in 90 days, hiring gaps named, budget for Design and Research secured.
The call: one way to embed design, across all three trains.
Tradeoff: three trains with three rhythms and three stakeholder cultures each gave up their own version of design for a shared one.
Result: a +15pt NPS gain across 12 months, driven by unified design direction and consistent advisor workflows.
The call: spend design's new credibility on an internal tool.
Tradeoff: the DEM tool had nothing to do with customers, in an org that hadn't been willing to make the AI investment.
Result: a 14-day developer workflow cut to 2 minutes, self-service and adopted org-wide, with a roadmap into 2027.
Awards
Celent Model Insurer Award — Customer Experience — Winner. Prudential Financial PPC Annuity Benefit Modeling & Retirement Transformation.
Prudential Financial Insurance Award for Excellence — Annuity Benefit Modeling & Retirement Transformation.
Trust was the deliverable
The lesson here: trust is the deliverable. I spent my first 90 days on people, partnerships and budget, not screens, and it felt slow at the time. It wasn't. Every win after that, from the NPS gain to the DEM tool, ran on credibility built early. What I'd do differently is make that trust visible sooner. Leadership saw the shipped work. They didn't always see the relationships underneath it, and that's the part worth reporting.
An organizational outcome, not just a UX one
When I joined, three design leaders had failed to stabilize this org in two years. When I left, the design function was embedded, trusted, and delivering consistently across three product trains for the first time.
That's an organizational outcome, not just a UX one.
The 17 designers I mentored had a clearer professional path, stronger agile integration, and a direct connection to the business strategy they were serving. The three CPOs had a design partner they could plan around. The cross-functional relationships with VoC, ADA, Legal, and Engineering were functioning. And the DEM tool had shipped and been adopted — an AI investment the org hadn't been willing to make until design had the credibility to advocate for it.
Design leadership in a complex financial organization is measured by one thing: does the business trust design enough to include it in the decisions that matter? By that measure, it worked.