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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A leading insulin pump manufacturer was losing ground. Cheaper, newer competitors were entering the market and eroding share, and the organization's existing product trajectory was not positioned to compete on anything other than price. The strategic question was not product optimization. It was whether there was a fundamentally different future the brand could own.

As part of the Innovation Task Force, I led a structured corporate foresight exercise using the Futures Cone framework to map the insulin pump market across two distinct horizons: mid-term, 3 to 5 years, and long-term, 10 years and beyond. I synthesized market signals, competitive dynamics, and emerging trends across the life sciences, medical device, and healthcare landscape to identify where the category was heading and where a differentiated strategic position was possible.

The foresight work produced a speculative strategic concept built around a single, generative idea: the device as an AI-powered lifetime companion, one that adapts to the patient as they grow rather than remaining static hardware to be replaced. To bring the vision to life beyond a slide deck, I created an AI-assisted video following a patient born with diabetes from their first welcome kit through 20 years of life milestones, showing how the experience, the technology, and the relationship between patient and device would evolve at each stage. The concept was not only a vision. It was accompanied by the technology and capability roadmap required to realize it.