The short version
- Role
- Founding Creative Director (Director, Experience Design).
- Team
- Built and led seven across UX, product design, brand, marketing, creative tech, copy and research, up from a core of two.
- Timeline
- Alpha 2022 to early 2024, when the platform was sunset. LIV launched Q4 2023.
- What I owned
- Creative direction and UX strategy end-to-end for Stages and LIV, plus the brand platform behind $25M in paid media.
- Outcome
- $1M pilot AUM target hit in 3 months against a 12-month goal. ~500K annual visitors converting at 6%.
Building Prudential's first direct-to-consumer front door
Prudential had no direct-to-consumer digital retirement experience. I joined as founding Creative Director before a single line of production code existed, and led the creation of two AI-powered products from concept to launch: Stages for Retirement — a web-based retirement planning platform — and LIV, a standalone mobile experience using generative AI to help users envision their dream retirement.
Within three months of launch, Stages surpassed its year-one pilot AUM target. At maturity, the platform was driving nearly 500,000 unique annual visitors at a 6% prospect conversion rate — above financial services industry benchmarks. LIV, launched in Q4 2023, established Prudential as one of the first consumer financial brands to ship a generative AI product.
Prudential had no front door — so the mandate was to build one.
Prudential's retirement business was built on advisor relationships and paper-based planning. As more of financial services moved toward direct digital engagement, a critical gap emerged: millions of Americans were thinking about retirement but had no Prudential-owned digital experience to meet them. The brand had no front door.
The mandate was to build one — not a brochure, not a microsite, but a full intelligent product capable of assessing retirement readiness, returning personalized guidance, and converting visitors into qualified prospects at scale. The additional challenge: building it from zero, inside a regulated financial services environment, with a team that had to grow as fast as the product.
Founding Creative Director — from 2 to 7
I joined at Alpha — before the product had a name, a visual language, or a single user. I built and led a team of seven spanning UX, product design, brand, marketing, creative technology, copywriting, and research — scaled from an initial two-person core. I owned creative direction and UX strategy end-to-end across both products.
My cross-functional mandate extended across Legal (navigating compliance and regulatory language requirements), Marketing ($25M in paid media at launch was built around the experience I designed), Paid Media, Engineering, and Data Science. I also served as the sole visionary behind LIV — conceiving the product from nothing, defining its brand identity, and leading its designers and engineers from ideation to launch.
Alpha → Beta → MVP
Alpha — Proving the Concept. The first phase focused on a single question: would a digital retirement planning experience convert at scale? We built rapid prototyping cycles with a lean team, establishing the foundational interaction model — a multi-step onboarding flow collecting financial profile data and returning a personalized Confidence Score, powered by OpenAI ML. Every design decision was tested against conversion, not aesthetics. The call at Alpha exit: commit to a full product, not a marketing microsite. The data supported it. We moved.
Beta — Building for Scale. Beta expanded both the team and the scope. We integrated into Prudential's Enterprise Design System while preserving Stages' own product identity. We introduced advisor scheduling (TimeTrade) as a direct CTA at four key points in the onboarding flow — creating a measurable digital-to-human handoff that connected users to Prudential's advisor network. Three documented iterations of the onboarding flow, each improving completion — leaving no doubt that onboarding completion had to outrank every other metric before launch. A product that loses users midway doesn't convert.
MVP — Launching with Confidence. By MVP, the product was ready for $25M in paid media behind it. The launch validated the bet. Within three months, Stages surpassed its year-one pilot AUM target — the primary business KPI — a milestone that had been set as a 12-month goal. The final onboarding completion rate at launch: 31.6% — nearly 1 in 3 registered users finishing a 12-step financial planning flow.
LIV — AI-Powered Retirement Helper
Most companies put AI on their roadmap. We shipped it.
Stages for Retirement was built on an OpenAI ML backbone from Alpha — analyzing financial data, generating retirement projections, and powering the personalized Confidence Score at the end of onboarding. But the AI story didn't end at the platform.
In Q4 2023, I conceived and launched LIV: an AI-powered retirement helper built as a standalone mobile experience, with the Retirement Location Planner as its flagship feature. Rather than asking users about their portfolio, LIV asked about their life. Users answered conversational questions about where they wanted to live and what mattered to them day-to-day — proximity to nature, cultural institutions, medical facilities, lifestyle priorities. OpenAI analyzed those inputs and generated personalized retirement location recommendations tailored to each user's specific answers.
The AI didn't return a number — it returned a direction. LIV was one of the first shipped generative AI products in consumer financial services.
LIV was conceived as the foundation of a broader "LIV your retirement" brand platform — a full AI-powered retirement life design experience planned to expand well beyond location planning. It launched with its own visual identity, dedicated marketing budget, and live users, funneling directly into the Stages platform to create an AI-powered acquisition loop from retirement aspiration to financial planning action.
The broader vision was cut short when the Stages platform was sunset in early 2024 — but what launched was real: a shipped AI product in a regulated financial services environment, designed with a deliberately warm, illustrative visual language distinct from Prudential's institutional tone.
The AI ran the whole stack, not one feature bolted on.
Product Intelligence — OpenAI ML
Retirement projections, financial analysis, personalized Confidence Score, LIV Retirement Location Planner backbone
Product Imagery — DALL-E
AI-generated retirement lifestyle visuals throughout the LIV UI
Development — Microsoft Copilot
Engineering acceleration across the entire build
Design Process — Microsoft Copilot
Copy editing and design synthesis
Workshops — MIRO AI
Rapid ideation and stakeholder facilitation across all phases
Four tracks. One platform story.
01 — Stages for Retirement
Prudential's first owned D2C retirement planning platform. Multi-step onboarding, personalized Confidence Score via OpenAI ML, advisor scheduling at four touchpoints creating a direct digital-to-human conversion path.
02 — LIV: AI-Powered Retirement Helper
A standalone AI mobile product I conceived from scratch. The Retirement Location Planner used OpenAI to analyze lifestyle priorities and return personalized retirement location recommendations. Launched Q4 2023 — one of the first shipped generative AI products in consumer financial services.
03 — Enterprise Design System
Built the component library and design standards governing visual consistency across both Stages and LIV — maintaining distinct product identities while staying inside Prudential's brand standards. Scalable architecture for a multi-product suite.
04 — Paid Media & Brand Strategy
Developed the "We get it. We got you." brand platform — the creative and messaging foundation for Stages, reviewed through Legal. The experience I designed was the primary conversion destination for $25M in paid media at launch and an estimated $50M in year two.
How we built it
Test & Learn. Every phase of Stages was built on a hypothesis-driven design cycle. We tested onboarding flows, CTA placements, and registration page structures with real users before scaling — then documented and acted on what the data showed. Three major onboarding redesigns between launch and Q4 2023 each produced measurable improvements in completion rate.
AI-Accelerated Design. Microsoft Copilot accelerated development and compressed design synthesis timelines. MIRO AI powered our workshop and ideation sessions. AI wasn't layered on top of our process — it was part of the methodology from day one.
Agile Iteration. Working in agile sprints across a cross-functional team of designers, engineers, UX writers, and marketing partners, we moved from Alpha to MVP launch in under two years — while navigating legal review, compliance requirements, and a $25M paid media launch timeline.
Three calls that shaped the product
The call: build a full product, not a marketing microsite.
Tradeoff: a microsite was the smaller ask. A product meant building from zero, inside a regulated environment, with a team that had to grow as fast as the product.
Result: the product that carried $25M in paid media and hit its $1M pilot AUM target in 3 months.
The call: onboarding completion outranks every other metric before launch.
Tradeoff: three documented rebuilds of the same flow, all on a $25M paid media launch timeline.
Result: 31.6% completion at launch. Nearly 1 in 3 users finished a 12-step financial planning flow.
The call: LIV asks about your life, not your portfolio.
Tradeoff: a warm, illustrative identity well outside Prudential's institutional tone, shipped inside a regulated industry.
Result: LIV launched Q4 2023 with live users, feeding Stages. One of the first shipped generative AI products in consumer financial services.
The full picture
6,881 advisor scheduling interactions in 10 months — the digital-to-human handoff working as designed
~2 million page views in 10 months
29,535 digital prospects registered in the first 10 months at a 6% conversion rate
Enterprise B2B channel established: employer Financial Wellness clients including Cigna and others
3 documented onboarding redesigns — measurable improvement at each iteration
LIV launched Q4 2023 — among the first consumer-facing generative AI products in financial services
In-house Creative Direction — 0→1 Marketing
The product wasn't the only thing I built from zero. As founding Creative Director, I stood up an agile in-house marketing pod — designers, copywriters, and brand strategists — and led the creative direction for Stages' full go-to-market. That meant everything from brand platform development to campaign concepting, art direction, and asset production across paid, owned, and earned channels.
The "We get it. We got you." brand platform — developed and reviewed through Legal — was the creative foundation that unified the product experience with the media buy. The experience I designed and the campaign I directed were one cohesive system, not separate workstreams. The result: a $25M paid media launch with an estimated $50M in year two, built on creative that converted.
6 CX Industry Awards
The Stages / LIV platform was recognized with six CX industry awards — validation of the product quality, the AI innovation, and the conversion performance built into the experience from the start.
What I'd do differently
Stages was sunset in early 2024, and LIV's bigger vision went with it. I won't dress that up. The product did its job: the AUM target fell in a quarter and the prospects kept coming. What I'd do differently is build the case for the platform's future as hard as I built the platform. Shipping fast earned trust in the product. It didn't guarantee the product a long life. Next time, the long-term business story goes in front of leadership with the first prototype.
Prudential's digital retirement capability — built from zero
When I joined, Prudential had no direct consumer digital retirement product. By the time the platform was sunset in early 2024, they had two. Over its life, Stages generated over 100,000 qualified prospects and driven tens of millions in AUM into the funnel. LIV had established a new product category for the brand — a consumer-facing AI retirement experience that was live, branded, and ahead of most of the industry at the time.
The design system, the AI architecture, the brand platform, and the team I built were the infrastructure that made both products possible. I didn't just ship a platform — I stood up Prudential's digital retirement capability from zero, and left behind the tools, systems, and vision to grow it further.
$25M in paid media is a bet on a product. The product has to be worth the bet. Stages was.