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Santiago
Caicedo

I'm a senior service designer and CX strategist with ~15 years of experience leading research, service design, experience strategy, and innovation across financial services, fintech, healthcare, and the public sector.

My practice sits at the intersection of strategy, design, and research. I reframe complex organizational challenges as structured design and experience problems, then move teams from ambiguity to actionable direction through customer empathy, systems thinking, service blueprinting, rapid prototyping, and executive co-design.

I hold the customer and the business outcome in equal view: every solution I design must be valuable to people and viable for the organization. I don't just deliver artifacts. I build the shared understanding that makes those artifacts stick and the downstream conditions for them to succeed.

I incorporate AI technologies into my research and synthesis practice, using them to accelerate pattern recognition, sharpen insight communication, and generate early-stage concepts for stakeholder validation and product-fit. I'm fluent in the emerging design challenges that AI introduces, including trust, transparency, and experience design for systems that learn. I speak English and Spanish natively, with deep cross-cultural research experience across US domestic and Latin American markets.

Approach to How I Work

My approach has been shaped by close to 15 years of consultingacross industries where the stakes are high, the stakeholders are skeptical,and the problems are rarely as simple as they first appear. Here is what thatlooks like in practice:

1. Start with Empathy, Frame Problems Worth Solving

Before any design work begins, I invest in understanding the experience from the inside out: stakeholder conversations, VoC and contact center data, or direct customer/employee fieldwork.

This is about framing the right problem before committing to a direction. Solutions built on incorrect problem framing either fail to generate adoption or solve the wrong thing entirely. Genuine customer empathy is how I point the work at something real.

2. Interconnected Systems Before Surfaces

Most customer experience problems are not interaction problems; they are organizational or structural issues that manifest at the surface. I map ecosystems, service journeys, and backstage processes to find the real leverage points, then design forward from there.

This gives organizations full visibility into what enables and what hinders the ideal customer experience, and surfaces the interdependencies between teams, processes, and technology that would otherwise stay invisible until they create expensive implementation failures.

3. Getting Buy-In Before Building a Solution

My deliverables, service blueprints, journey maps, opportunity frameworks, and roadmaps, are built to create shared direction across design, product, technology, and operational teams.

The workshops and alignment sessions I design and facilitate give cross-functional teams a genuine stake in the solution. Alignment is how I pave the way for downstream implementation. A solution the business helped shape, is a solution the business will actually execute.

4. Prototype to Pressure Test,  Not to Impress

I prototype to validate, not to showcase craft. I leverage different fidelity levels: lo-fi storyboards to test mental models early, mid-fi mockups to stress-test with stakeholders, hi-fi prototypes to confirm before committing to engineering. Every round is a chance to discover what does not work before the organization has paid to build it.

I advocate for experimentation to de-risk investment, compress the cost of being wrong, and evolve concepts from early-stage to implementation-ready with evidence at every step.

5. Enterprise Scale, Executive Presence

I work best in cross-functional, enterprise environments. My projects routinely span design, product, engineering, operations, compliance, and C-suite stakeholders across large, matrixed organizations.
I have directed teams of up to five consultants and led co-design sessions with everyone from frontline probation officers to Fortune 500 executives.

I frame customer and experience strategy in business terms, read senior leadership dynamics, and build the trust that makes difficult alignment possible. The ability to navigate that range is not incidental to my work; it is central to delivering solutions that survive contact with the organization.

6. Storytelling That Moves People to Act

I communicate visually and persuasively. I translate complex strategy into frameworks, maps, and narratives that non-design audiences can act on.

I create ecosystem and conceptual diagrams as alignment tools: they make interdependencies legible, simplify complex topics, and give cross-disciplinary teams a common language for problems that would otherwise stay stuck in silos.

I also whiteboard live, using real-time diagramming to drive in-the-room synthesis and keep discussions grounded.

Case
Case
studies
Studies
OTHER
Other
Projects
Projects

The case studies above represent a curated sample. Below is a selection of additional engagements that reflect the breadth of my practice:

Digital Health Product:

Created a mobile-native application for patients and caregivers to manage health appointments and medication needs for a Fortune 5 company.

Life-Critical Medical Device:

Digital product design for a next-generation defibrillator used by paramedics, spanning lo-fi through confirmatory hi-fi research with frontline healthcare professionals.

Consumer Health Device:

Designed and tested the mobile experience for a medically-graded weight control device, from early concept through product-fit validation.

Clinical Trials Experience:

Designed the patient experience for enrollment in new clinical trials; led a team to create a digital experience for completing onboarding, and  begin the trial.

Respite Nursing Employee Experience:

Led generative research and service design to reduce burnout and dropout rates among respite nurses at a healthcare provider.

Insurance Model for Single Mothers:

Co-Designed a new insurance model concept for single mothers in the Peruvian market, grounded in ethnographic research.

Strategic Plan for a LGBTQ+ youth organization:

Developed a five-year strategic plan covering growth, service model, and operational structure for an LGBTQ+ youth-serving organization.

Material Science Storytelling:

Co-developed a digital product enabling scientists to translate technical research for non-specialist audiences.

Cross-Brand Cruise Experience:

Co-Developed a service strategy to unify the cruise experience across three different brands for a Fortune 500 company.

Testimonials from clients and colleagues.

"Where others face challenge in making it happen, Santiago showed leadership by starting and managing the Innovation Task Force with a multidisciplinary team. This taskforce is set to be instrumental in promoting more imaginative and broader thinking, thereby shaping the strategic program opportunities we aim to secure."

- Managing Director
"Santiago Caicedo's leadership and respectful challenging helped us to create the highest quality outcome. He created and shared tools that we can leverage in the future. He was adaptable, and open to allowing us to "cook in the kitchen" and collaborate in the best way for us. He is a partner."

- Insurance Client
“Santiago finessed some skeptical clients and helped them see the impact of the research and empathetic service design he undertook. Our internal team were wowed by the output of his work and experience of working with him”

– Senior Director
“Santi is an extremely passionate thought leader, customer strategist, and listener. The way he planned and crafted questions for 1:1 interviews with nurses and human-centered design workshops showcased his deep understanding of the problem we were trying to solve for our client. The workshop execution was enjoyed by the client, and they highlighted multiple times that the process was so well thought out and conducted that it gave them a new way to ideate within the nursing team for future initiatives or problem solving.”

- Senior Principal

Methods & Tools

Design Methods

Research Methods

Facilitation

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Have a challenge you'd love to tackle? Santiago thrives on finding creative solutions.

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