Human-focused and future-optimized.

What could a 169 year-old life insurance company learn about design strategy and customer experience?

A lot, it turns out.

Note: For client privacy and legal purposes, I cannot share documentation with this work sample. Trust me. You would love the wall-sized uber-map I brewed up. It's a game-changer.

The Problem

NM was facing a crisis of collaboration. Leadership knew they were leaving opportunities on the table to better satisfy customers. While they had all the right people in the building, leadership had a hunch these folks weren't in the right rooms or even aware of each other's efforts on a given day.

One executive VP had seen enough.

She sent me on a 6-month excursion to unearth hidden truth, map buried treasure, and blast through ancient barriers holding back the brilliance of 7+ customer-facing departments.

The Process

• Research and Facilitation. I spent dozens of hours tracking down obscure documents and connecting people for deep conversations about the state of the CX in their respective units.
• Synthesis. I manifested what can only be described as a mural-sized map that tracked the customer journey from lead to legacy, highlighting not just customer satisfaction at each point of the journey, but business narratives, opportunities, gaps, and gold therein.
• Delivery. I spent the last month working with leadership to craft a presentation that my sponsors would take to the board for an eye-opening, mouth-watering buffet of customer success opportunities.

The Big Picture

• This map, man. I won't take credit for cooking up a brand new artifact type, but I remixed a few known ones (journey map, success map, org chart to name a few) into a super-document that was powerful at a glance and transformative in its detail. It takes a bold vision and a heap of experience to pull that off with the amount of energy and buy-in that I did in just six months.
• Barrier Breaker. I was given unprecedented access to teams across the company. This was somewhat of an experiment in itself because NM saw this brand of omniscience for non-executives to be a liability (spoiler: insurance companies hate risk). However, my success paved the way for future design leaders to find their footing in conversations that continue to transform the business to this day.

I have a habit of writing down 10 ideas a day. In the winter of 2020, my idea list started like this: "MMA TTRPG."

Two years, and a mountain of design debris later, I launched the best, and only, MMA Sim/RPG on the market called Legacy of the Cage: The Gauntlet. Ask any of the sim-enthusiasts out there slugging away and they'll tell you that LotC is a fight fan's tabletop dream come true.

"I've been dying for an MMA system for years and believe I found the right one!"

— Jordan, DriveThruRPG customer

The Problem

Simple: I wanted to play a game that took the best parts of DnD and UFC and smashed them together into a Blood Bowl-flavored package (minus the minis) that I could roll up in minutes with any old dice. I had a hunch others might feel that way, too, especially if I ramped up the player-growth-achievement curve.

The Process

• Workshopping. I hosted a solo series of game design workshops until I had a foundation that felt right.
• Game Testing. I mailed out physical draft copies to a trusted group of friends and gamer acquaintances for a structured, candid playtest. I deployed a customized VTT (Roll20) system for our remote research sessions.
• Massive Learning. I'd never delivered a whole book before (even merely digital), and it took all of my design senses plus my technical savvy to learn the nuances of independent game publishing. Oh, and I had to spin up a new company called PlayArchitect Games, too.

The Big Picture

• Game Design = Anti-UX. The art of game design is balancing player agency in the face of contrived obstacles. In other words, I make up interesting, but frustrating, problems for people to solve on purpose. This is exactly the opposite process of traditional enterprise UX. Having this universal perspective makes me a force in the design world.
• If you put your mind to it... is exactly how I felt after I hit "publish" on this project. There isn't much that can stop me from understanding a problem and taking it down, little by little, until I've achieved victory.
• Play is Underrated. Outside the game industry, playfulness is seen as a cute curiosity. I've learned that play creates a beneficial feedback loop where we're able to safely test strategies, design our own paths to achievement, and bring optimism and energy to both our worlds and those of our clients and customers.

What happens to a product manager whose workflow is a spiderweb mess of intertangled tools and processes? Think: GDrive + Asana + Slack + Figma + GitHub and on and on.

Chaos.

General Collaboration was the answer. The catch? They needed funding to get the business off the ground and into reality.

The Problem

General Collaboration had a simple value proposition: centralize the conversation and simplify project communication. No more lost ideas. No more searching for that comment that you thought the engineer posted last week. No more emailing your designer to check out a Slack channel about a Figma file.

Just one stop for all things project management right there in your browser.

GC was prepped with research and a design brief. They needed the story and the sizzle to get the investors on board.

The Process

• Storymapping. We took what we knew about the user pain and crafted a winning narrative in three parts. Identify the inciting pain (the old way of doing things), embark on the journey to General Collaboration's groundbreaking product offer, and deliver that gratifying wave of relief from having all your project management tangles sorted out in one spot.
• Design Crafting. We wove a series of aspirational prototypes into the pitch and brought the investors through every step of the customer's life, demonstrating the power of GC's solution through the eyes of the user.
• Deckbuilding. Our story came to life across a series of a few dozen illustrated concept slides that was portable, customizable, and reusable for multiple pitches.

Hapn is a leader in the GPS tracking industry with a unique paired hardware/software platform offering. As a long-time trusted product strategy consultant reporting directly to the Director of Product and CEO, I worked to transform Hapn's B2C and B2B business from a middling competitor to a legitimate contender in record time.

The Problem

Hapn's flagship desktop suite was lagging behind their already stellar mobile experience (delivered previously with my guidance). Users with larger GPS tracker swarms struggled to make sense of the experience. Hapn leadership was ready for a massive restructuring of their platform to pave the way for growth and retention.

The Process

• Comprehensive product audit. We poked every hole possible and reviewed all experience workflows against the business and user scenarios.
• Prioritization. Once we found all the trouble spots, we mapped out the most critical wins in order of business ROI.
• Execution. Over the next 6 months, we rebuilt the core experience from first-principles and delivered a holistic, stable, and reliable desktop platform.

The Big Picture

• Holistic Vision, Precision Execution. This project highlights my rare, but indispensable ability to operate at all levels of the product organization and illuminate the illusory, yet, all-important through-lines that bind the experience.
• AI-Turbocharged Timelines. Despite my half-a-decade of AI modeling, research, and enthusiasm, this particular client was the first business partner to open my eyes to AI-as-legitimate-production assistant. My process has been a rocketship ride since.
• Negotiating the Pilot. This was a prime example of the power of prioritization. We didn't opt to launch the whole shebang at once. Instead, we built and shipped a series of compounding feature wins and gathered meaningful customer data in the process.