STACEY LAYNE MARTIN
UX & SERVICE DESIGN LEADER
The platform was new. The experience was still being decided.
The short version
A new Wealth platform, no dedicated Product Ownership, and technology leading the conversation.
Feasibility was about to decide the experience before anyone had decided what the experience should be.
Led and owned the experience work as the singular design partner; partnered with Line of Business, Marketing and Technology.
Work evolved into advisor experience, contact-center, and executive workstreams. Enabled launch and change management teams with design deliverables.
RECONSTRUCTED · NOT ENTERPRISE ARTIFACT
What we were looking at
A major Wealth transformation was underway on a new platform. There was no dedicated Product Ownership, and technology was initially leading the conversation — which meant feasibility constraints risked shaping the work before the intended experience had been prioritized.
The scope was large: multiple client and advisor journeys, several platforms and capabilities, and organizational dependencies that didn't yet share a picture of the whole. This was a multi-million dollar business change that would impact over 100,000 clients.
What was actually going on
Interviews with clients and non-clients, and multiple journey workshops, made something visible: the platform existed, but the experience it should deliver hadn't been decided. The technology conversation was quietly standing in for an experience decision no one had explicitly made.
A login is not an onboarding. A platform is not an experience.
This wasn't a dramatic twist — it was a slow clarification. The more the journeys were mapped, the more the gaps and unowned decisions surfaced.
The platform game
Decision it supported: how should clients first understand and explore the platform?
REPRESENTATIVE
What became visible: an interactive game let clients explore the platform and, at the same time, generated research signal about what they expected and where they got lost — one artifact doing double duty.
My role in it
How we moved
What changed
Client and advisor journeys were made explicit and given an owner's point of view.
Experience requirements and gaps informed what got prioritized, ahead of feasibility defaults.
A shared ecosystem picture connected platforms, capabilities, and dependencies.
One shared vocabulary, issued across every team while definitions were still cheap to change.
Cross-team decisions route through numbered decision registers to their owners — design keeps moving without absorbing calls that belong to Risk or Security.
No metrics are claimed here that can't be verified.
RECONSTRUCTED · NOT ENTERPRISE ARTIFACT
What I see now
A gap I saw later than I'd like: advisor experience needed more dedicated UX attention than a single design partner could give it while holding the client work. Naming that earlier would have changed how I argued for the team.
What remains unresolved: requirements to drive the third-party build of a native onboarding experience that accounts for prospect vs. client personas. The frame that made this work possible — experience-first — is also a frame, and worth questioning as the platform matures.