Achieved a 15% sales conversion increase, 35% reduction in partner churn, and 6% decrease in support calls through strategic prioritization and improved discovery processes.
Empresa:
Ben Visa Vale, a Santander Group startup
Tipo de projeto:
Criação de processo de discovery e framework de priorização para produto baseado em dados
Resultado:
- 20% reduction in prototyping and testing errors
- 35% increase in design team productivity
- Active design participation in planning and prioritization meetings
- 15% improvement in sales conversion rates
- 6% reduction in support calls
- 35% decrease in partner churn
Date:
January 2021 – December 2021 (12 months)
Role: Head de UX/CX
As Head of UX, my primary responsibility was to lead the transformation of the discovery process and product prioritization, ensuring that design played a strategic role in decision-making. I collaborated with various departments and coordinated a team of designers, handling everything from strategic definition to execution and implementation.
Key Responsibilities:
- Ensuring alignment between product, engineering, and stakeholders.
- Facilitating workshops to foster collaboration between design and product teams.
- Developing a metrics-based prioritization framework.
- Overseeing the design and prototyping process.
Context
Before:
The product team was nascent, with inexperienced leadership heavily influenced by the bank’s project-driven culture. This resulted in challenges such as:
Difficulty prioritizing initiatives and balancing essential features with innovation.
Top-down decisions that left no room for argumentation.
Last-minute demands leading to low-quality design outputs and limited capacity for research or discovery.
Customers frequently complained about the lack of basic functionalities, which were often overlooked in favor of disconnected innovations. This misalignment directly impacted sales workflows and customer satisfaction.
Objective:
To transform the team into a strategic, data-driven unit capable of prioritizing effectively, balancing foundational features and innovations, and amplifying design’s influence in planning decisions.
Problem Statement:
How can we transform a team with inexperienced leadership and a project-driven culture into a strategic, data-informed unit that prioritizes effectively and ensures design’s participation in strategic planning?
Solution Delivered
Discovery Process Implementation:
Introduced a structured discovery process with a checklist for PMs to evaluate initiatives before starting.
Metrics-Based Prioritization Framework:
Developed a data-driven framework to guide prioritization of features and initiatives.
Strategic Initiative Rules:
Defined rules for evaluating each initiative based on problem clarity and user impact, leveraging prototyping or deeper research when needed.
Process and Methodology:
Business:
Aligned company objectives with clear prioritization criteria, creating a metrics-based framework to support product decisions with data.
People: Which persona will this affect?
Partnered with the product team to co-develop the discovery process, including a designer-driven checklist for initiative evaluation.
Key Questions:
- What problem are we solving?
- What evidence supports this problem?
- What outcome do we expect?
Processes:
Implemented a strategy to evaluate each initiative:
- If still ambiguous: conducted full research and discovery sessions.
- If the problem was clear: proceeded with prototyping and testing.
- If unclear: analyzed user behavior using usage data metrics.
Communication:
Actively participated in product planning and prioritization meetings, using the metrics framework to ground discussions and ensure design had a strategic voice.
Successfully argued against top-down decisions disconnected from discovery insights, ensuring alignment with user and business needs.
Quality:
Ensured high-quality outcomes by validating hypotheses through the discovery process before implementation, reducing errors in final outputs and enhancing the user experience.
Results
20% reduction in prototyping and testing errors through robust discovery practices.
35% increase in design team productivity with clear priorities and structured workflows.
6% decrease in support calls by addressing user pain points effectively.
15% improvement in sales conversion rates through better alignment with customer needs.
35% reduction in partner churn due to enhanced feature prioritization and delivery.
Key Learnings
A structured discovery process paired with a data-driven framework transforms prioritization and enhances design’s role in decision-making.
Empowering designers to challenge assumptions and ground decisions in evidence fosters more impactful product development.
Basic functionalities must be prioritized alongside innovation to address user pain points effectively and improve business outcomes.
Extras:
While developing a design system during this project was not a primary focus, it contributed to standardization and improved delivery efficiency, reinforcing the overall success of the initiative.