Santiago Caicedo's Portfolio

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.

1. Designing Trust for Small Business Owners Who Did Not Ask for a Fuel Card
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A mobility-focused fintech was seeing significant early churn: small business owners were completing enrollment and then disengaging before building any habit around the product. The experience had been built for scale, not for the human on the other end of it.

I led the engagement end to end, combining contact center data, NPS, activation metrics, and close to 15 contact center call recordings with two rounds of 1-on-1 customer interviews spanning 16 participants. The core finding was clarifying: small business owners are not thinking about financial products, and the experience was never designed to earn their attention on their own terms.

The research produced 3 customer archetypes and close to 35 identified and prioritized pain points. I synthesized these into a future-state service blueprint, 8 channel-specific communication briefs, 11 actionable onboarding initiatives with a 12-month implementation roadmap and a rationale for sequencing. The strategy was designed to address four simultaneous goals: reduce early churn, increase product activation and usage, reduce inbound call volume, and accelerate customer activation in the first 120 days.

The work delivered a 2% reduction in early churn. More importantly, the client trusted the output enough to expand the engagement: we were brought back to implement 6 of the 11 prioritized initiatives. The client's VP of Small Business described the output as a blueprint valuable enough to share across the entire company, directly validating the strategic direction for their 2025 product and communications investment.

Year: 2025

Domain: Financial Services / Fintech

My Contributions: CX Strategy, Onboarding Strategy and Design, Service Design, Human-Centered Research, Journey Mapping, Workshop Facilitation, Systems Thinking

2. The First App Built for the Way Car Dealerships Actually Manage Their Finances
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Before a financial institution could build its first mobile product, it needed to understand how its customers, auto dealerships managing vehicle inventory and floor plan credit, actually worked. The product team had internal assumptions. I had a mandate to replace them with evidence.

I led the research effort, conducting qualitative studies across multiple US markets to map customer behavior, surface friction points, and identify what a mobile experience needed to do to be genuinely useful. My research shaped the product's core feature set and informed the UX design handed off to engineering.

The app launched natively in 2023 and the results speak to what happens when product decisions are grounded in validated user behavior. Within the first six months, the app achieved a 55% adoption rate among independent dealer clients. The combination of real-time features and self-reconciliation capabilities reduced dealer business interruptions by up to 80%. For large dealer clients, the mobile-driven workflow saved up to two weeks of manual follow-up time across multiple staff members. The app has maintained an average rating above 4 stars across both major app stores since launch.

The research I produced gave the product team a prioritized feature framework they could defend to engineering with user evidence, compressing the negotiation cycle between design and development and reducing the risk of building features that real users would not adopt.

Year: 2022

Domain: Mobility / Financial Services

My Contributions: Product Innovation and Strategy, Design Strategy, Market Research, Experience and Product-fit Research, Product Design

3. Unifying a Fragmented Payment Experience Across Every Channel That Matters
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Customers at a fintech with multiple financial products had no coherent and harmonious way to manage and pay their obligations across them. Roughly 70% of inbound support contacts were the direct result. Worse, different parts of the organization had never seen the end-to-end experience as a whole, which meant they were debating solutions to problems they had never collectively defined.

I led a team that mapped the full current-state service experience across all customer-facing and operational touchpoints, facilitated multiple cross-functional discovery and visioning workshops, and built a data-driven prioritization framework that moved internal alignment from debate to evidence.

The output was a comprehensive current and future-state service blueprint and 6 strategic initiatives aligned to the organization's vision pillars, covering 20 parity solutions designed to reduce call center volume, improve customer satisfaction, and lower operational costs. Research consistently shows that unified payment experiences in financial services are intended to reduce cost-to-serve by 20 to 40 percent and significantly improve first-contact resolution rates; this engagement was designed to capture those gains.

The approach gave business, product, and technology stakeholders a shared direction they had not previously had, enabling investment decisions against a prioritized roadmap rather than competing opinions.

Year: 2026

Domain: Financial Services / Fintech

My Contributions: CX Strategy, User Research, Journey Mapping, Service Blueprinting, Omnichannel Experience Strategy, Stakeholder Alignment, Implementation Roadmap Development, Systems Thinking

4. Designing Trust for an Entire Profession's Most Important Career Transition
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A leading US dental professional association needed to create something that had never existed for its members: a trusted, structured marketplace to buy, sell, and transition dental practices. The market problem was real and growing: a retirement wave among Baby Boomer dentists, a large incoming cohort of Millennial dentists frustrated by DSO contracts, and no neutral, values-aligned platform connecting them.

I co-led the end-to-end service experience for a new business model and its accompanying digital platform, working as innovation consultant responsible for service concept development, product-fit research, end-to-end service blueprinting, and digital product experience design. The work started with ethnographic research across four US states: I conducted 36 one-on-one interviews of approximately one hour each, spanning seasoned dentists, new dentists, and students. The research was designed to understand how dentists think about practice transition, what makes the process feel trustworthy or opaque, and where the experience breaks down under real conditions.

Those insights shaped the service model, the digital experience architecture, and the support structure built around transition advisors. The research produced a validated service concept grounded in how practitioners actually make transition decisions. When we presented the findings to the organization's board, the evidence was compelling enough that they hired the team again to build and launch the platform.

The platform launched in 2 states and expanded nationally to all 50 states. As of the most recent data, ADA Practice Transitions (ADAPT) has served more than 7,500 dentists across the country. The platform won the 2021 Chicago Innovation Award in technology. The service concept that began with 36 ethnographic interviews became a nationally recognized product that gave an entire profession a first-of-its-kind tool.

Year: 2026

Domain: Professional Services

My Contributions: Service Innovation, Design Strategy, Experience and Product-fit Research, Service Design, Experience Design, Product Strategy, Systems Thinking

5. A Modernization Initiative That Put Probation Officers at the Center of the Design
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A New England state Justice Department was implementing a new Salesforce CRM for its Probation Division, but the technology was moving faster than the organization's understanding of its own workflows. Industry research consistently shows that 70% or more of CRM implementations fail to meet their objectives, with poor user adoption and inadequate alignment to how people actually work cited as the dominant causes. This engagement was designed to address that problem before it materialized.

I led the end-to-end service design work as project lead, research lead, and workshop facilitator. I conducted one-on-one interviews with probation officers to document how they actually worked and where the current system was breaking down, then designed and facilitated a series of in-person and virtual workshops to envision a modernized probation case management experience.

The outputs gave the technology team the service design foundation they needed to configure Salesforce accurately: a current-state and future-state service blueprint grounded in frontline reality rather than IT assumptions. Equally important, the process gave the organization something it had lacked: a shared vision across business unit leaders who had not previously aligned on a common direction. By ensuring the Salesforce architecture reflected how probation officers actually manage cases, the work was intended to reduce adoption resistance, free officers from administrative burden, and improve both the efficiency and efficacy of probation case management.

Year: 2024

Domain: Public Sector / Justice

My Contributions: Service Design, Systems Thinking, User/Employee Research, Workshop Design and Facilitation, Journey Mapping, Service Blueprinting, Stakeholder Alignment, Salesforce Implementation Support

6. 100 Years In, and Still Worth Asking: What Does Membership Actually Mean?
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Entering its 100th year, a prominent professional association of MBA alumni needed an honest answer to a question most organizations avoid: was the membership still worth it? Industry research shows that 66% of prospects who do not join an association cite lack of perceived value as the reason, and that the primary challenge for most associations is not that they fail to provide value but that they struggle to articulate it. This engagement was designed to close that gap.

I designed and led a two-phase mixed-methods research program combining discovery research and concept testing. The discovery phase included 12 stakeholder interviews and 24 member engagements spanning a combination of one-on-one interviews and 3 in-person focus groups. I synthesized the findings into 6 actionable insights covering member representation, brand reach, onboarding, audience diversity, and the value of learning experiences, and presented the results directly to organizational leadership alongside a prioritized opportunity framework. The second phase tested concepts for improving both membership value and event attendance, giving the organization validated directions rather than speculative recommendations.

The association left with a research-grounded roadmap and the evidence base to make investment decisions confidently for the next chapter of their history. The research reframed an internal debate about perceived membership decline into a structured prioritization exercise, moving leadership from speculation to data-backed direction.

Year: 2023

Domain: Professional Services / Higher Education Adjacent

My Contributions: Membership Value Strategy, Mixed-Methods Research, Survey Design, Focus Groups, Stakeholder Interviews, Insight Synthesis, Workshop Facilitation, Executive Presentation, Quantiative Research

7. A Playbook That Helped a University Grow Without Losing Its Students
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When a Peruvian higher education institution set out to expand nationally, it brought in a design strategy and research team to ask a harder question first: what does the student experience actually look like today, and what needs to change before we scale it?

I co-led a six-month research and design effort, conducting qualitative ethnographic research across two cities, Lima and Arequipa. The research program included more than 36 student interviews, approximately a dozen professor interviews, and approximately a dozen administrative staff interviews, capturing the full ecosystem of the student experience from multiple vantage points. Every insight was grounded in direct field observation, not institutional assumption.

The output was a two-part strategy that became the foundation for the institution's national expansion:
- a Student Success Playbook defining how staff should support students through their academic journey at every touchpoint, including curriculum, innovation and entrepreneurship programming, and campus environment design, and
- a Faculty and Staff Persona framework to raise the hiring bar for the new student-centered model.

The institution implemented both frameworks directly. In the years following, the student-centered model the research helped define contributed to a broader institutional transformation: the university earned a 5-star QS Online Learning rating, achieved B-Corp certification, and reached a top-7 national ranking.

Year: 2018

Domain: Education

My Contributions: Ethnographic Research, Service Design, Service Innovation, Student Experience Strategy, Organizational Design Alignment, Systems Thinking,

8. A Better Experience for Benefits Administrators, and a Measurable Operational Payoff
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Managing employee benefits should not require a call to the insurance company every time something changes. That was the reality for benefit administrators at a major US and Canadian insurer, where a fragmented and unintuitive experience was generating unnecessary inbound support volume for some of the most routine tasks in the administrator workflow.

I led the design strategy within a broader digital transformation program. The research phase included interviews with close to two dozen benefit administrators across medium and small companies, covering the full range of tasks that were generating friction. I planned, designed, and conducted immersive workshops spanning discovery, alignment, and co-creation phases, bringing cross-functional stakeholders into the design process at each stage.

From the research, I developed early storyboard concepts, a future-state service blueprint and then led the product design team that created the initial interactive prototype, which was tested and refined through multiple rounds of evaluative research and usability testing.

‍The work was structured to deliver two measurable outcomes: a reduction in call center volume by improving self-service completion rates for the most common administrator tasks, and a redesigned system that genuinely reflects how benefit administrators work, not how the insurer assumed they did.

Year: 2023

Domain: Insurance

My Contributions: Product Innovation, Rapid Prototyping, Ethnographic Research, Experience and Product-fit Research, Business Transformation, Design Strategy, Workshop Facilitation, Service Design, Systems Thinking

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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.

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:

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

Testimonials from clients and colleagues.

Design Methods

Research Methods

Facilitation

Tools

Domains

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