Showcase : Product Strategy
Build or Buy? Corporate Communications System
Problem Statement
A global leader in financial information services faced a pivotal decision about their proprietary enterprise communications system - a mission-critical platform used by tens of thousands of global employees and vendors for their daily business interactions.
The system's strategic value lay in its seamless integration with the firm's proprietary tools and workflows, creating a highly secure ecosystem for sensitive business communications. This unique platform, while internally complex, enabled controlled, compliant communication flows across the organization's global operations.
However, after a decade of incremental updates, the aging platform faced mounting technical debt. The leadership team needed to make a high-stakes decision: Invest in a complete system redesign, or transition to an established vendor's enterprise communication solution.
Challenge:
Maintain business continuity for a global user base during any transition
Preserve integration with hundreds of internal workflows and tools
Ensure compliance with stringent security and regulatory requirements
Evaluate build vs. buy implications on operational control and business agility
Key Activities
Strategic Discovery & Analysis
Led a comprehensive discovery process, developing a pioneering analysis framework that evaluated not just system capabilities, but the platform's critical role in shaping and maintaining the firm's global culture
Conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 100 executives and key stakeholders across global offices in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, gaining unprecedented insights into enterprise-wide communication needs
Designed and executed a global survey reaching thousands of employees, achieving significant response rates that validated key findings
Technical & User Experience Analysis
Synthesized research into actionable insights, producing a strategic roadmap of essential features mapped against user pain points and business impact
Created a sophisticated feature classification system to guide engineering efforts, categorizing requirements by implementation complexity and business value
Performed detailed gap analysis comparing leading vendor solutions against the firm's unique requirements, uncovering critical capability mismatches
Developed high-fidelity prototypes demonstrating integration scenarios with existing workflows, providing leadership with tangible evidence of potential vendor solution limitations
Strategic Recommendation & Execution
Delivered a compelling, research-backed recommendation for in-house development that secured executive buy-in
Outcome
Following the acceptance of my strategic recommendation to build in house, I was asked to lead the redesign the system:
Strategic Design Leadership:
Transformed extensive user research insights into a clear product vision and design strategy
Crafted design principles that balanced innovation with familiarity to drive user adoption
Designed a scalable interface system that provided a blueprint for development and consistency
User Experience Impact:
Created an intuitive interface design that minimized learning curves while supporting complex workflows
Validated design solutions through iterative user testing and refinement
Developed a user-centered transition strategy to guide the eventual platform rollout
Design & Collaboration:
Partnered effectively with business, engineering teams and user communities to ensure design feasibility and maintain vision
Facilitated alignment between UX, technical, and business stakeholders through clear design documentation and presentations
Established user-centered design processes that kept user needs at the forefront of decision-making
The successful implementation of my design resulted in a platform that significantly improved the daily experience of users across the global enterprise. The project has demonstrated the value of thorough research and user-centered design in a large-scale digital transformation.