Current Role: Senior UX Strategist for the self-directed onboarding experience

Overview: Guiding and inspiring teams to design and develop a world-class onboarding experience. Here’s what that entails, along with key accomplishments:

Modernizing Infrastructure: Moving off of legacy platforms to Vanguard’s New Generation Platform.

For over four years, CXD (Client Experience + Design division = Vanguard’s Agile department) has been working hard to dismantle, modernize, re-envision the tech stack, data infrastructure, client experience and mind-set of all crew to New Ways of Working (UCD.) The immensity of the effort cannot be overstated, with over 20,000 employees across the globe, managing over 8T dollars worth of assets. My part is this has been to define and exemplify the client’s voice, during one of the most critical points in their journey: orienting and onboarding >> ‘becoming’ a Vanguard investor. Along with being a strong advocate for the client, strategies I deploy must also weigh in critical dependencies with technical roadmaps, business OKRs and navigating the shifting sea of exceeding client expectations.

Dependencies driving strategic decisions:

• Elevating Vanguard’s (new) Design System: Constellation. A key member of CXD’s ‘OneVanguard’ counsel, I’m partnering with Vanguard’s Experience Team (VET) on building requirements, componentizing interactions specific to our onboarding flows. Initially set to complete in three-phases, we must take into consideration our tech roadmap to MicroServices, understand where our Advice partners are in elevating (we support parts of their onboarding flows) and balance with already-packed roadmaps.

• Multi-channel to Omnichannel strategy for onboarding and the Invest Vision. As our partners in Channels and Capabilities stand up Conversational UI teams (Live Chat, SMS, Chatbot and Secure Message Center)

• Fraud Mitigation Architecture: after a significant attack on our systems in 2021, movement towards making safe our investors as well as our internal business operations moved ahead of all other priorities in our Roadmaps. Out of necessity, I had to act fast and get smart quickly as I represented the Adaptive Authentication experience team, creating a white paper of best-practices and strategies for moving towards FIDO

Advanced Research Initiatives

Research is close to my heart. Although I’m no longer building, conducting and synthesizing research initiatives like I was in previous roles, I work daily with internal and external research partners to delve deep into the heart of our investors. Companies such as McKinsey, Forrester, Deloitte, Frog Agency and Corporative Insights have been active partners in defining our North Star vision, along with talented internal research teams. I often play a major role is shaping goals, structuring outlines, maintaining quality assurance within execution and framing up synthesized results for key stakeholders.

Example: Currently wrapped up a 30-60-90 day journal study, inclusive of moderated interviews in order to understand the client experience directly AFTER a new account in opened. Insights from this work has led to cross-collaborative ‘orientation experiences’ to those who first log in to their new account, along with a major modification efforts to Retail Marketing’s engagement email strategy.

Developing a world-class onboarding’s vision

I’ve been leading internal UX teams, as well as UX contractors from Ernst & Young (EY) towards the development of our North Star. This work has run in parallel through our scale efforts, paving the way for what’s to come when our experience is driven by behavioral data.