Santiago Caicedo - 2024 Portfolio

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.

Santiago led the engagement end to end, combining contact center data, NPS, and activation metrics with direct human-centered research to understand why the first 120 days were failing customers. 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 redesign produced 5 customer archetypes, 1 future-state service blueprint, 8 marketing briefs, and a prioritized 2025 implementation roadmap.

Early churn dropped by 2%, and the client's VP of Small Business called the result a blueprint valuable enough to share across the entire company.

Domain: Financial Services / Fintech Contributions: CX Strategy, Onboarding Strategy & Design, Service Design, Mixed-Methods Research, Journey Mapping, Workshop Facilitation, Experience Prototyping, Multi-Channel Communications Strategy

2. 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 way to manage and pay their obligations across them, and roughly 70% of inbound support contacts were the result. Worse, different parts of the organization had never seen the end-to-end experience as a whole.

Santiago lead a team that mapped the full current-state service experience, facilitated multiple cross-functional discovery and visioning workshops, and built a data-driven framework to prioritize pain points by business impact, moving internal alignment from debate to evidence.

The output was a comprehensive current and future-state service blueprint, 6 initiatives tied to the organization's vision pillars.

The omnichannel strategy contained a total of 20 parity solutions aligned to strategic goals, with a roadmap designed to reduce call center volume, improve customer satisfaction, and lower operational costs.

Domain: Financial Services / Fintech Contributions: CX Strategy, User Research, Journey Mapping, Service Blueprinting, Omnichannel Experience Strategy & Design, Implementation Roadmap Development

3. Designing the Exit: A New Marketplace for Dental Practice Transitions
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A leading US dental professional association needed to create something that had never existed for its members: a trusted, structured way to buy and sell adental practice.

Santiago co-led the end-to-end service experience for a new business model and its accompanying digital platform. The work started with ethnographic research across the US, going into dental offices to understand how dentists thought about transition and what made the process feel trustworthy, opaque and risky. Those insights shaped the service model, the digital experience, and the support structure built around transition advisors.

The result launched in 2 states and expanded nationally, giving an entire profession a first-of-its-kind tool built around how they actually think and work.

Domain: Professional Services Contributions: Service Innovation, Design Strategy, Experience & Product-fit Research, Service Design, Experience Design, Product Strategy, Product Design, Problem & Opportunity Framing

4. 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?

Santiago designed and led a mixed-methods research program combining focus groups, stakeholder and member interviews, and a 210-member quantitative survey, then synthesized the findings into 6 actionable insights covering: member representation, brand reach, onboarding, audience diversity, and the value of learning experiences. He presented the results and a prioritized opportunity framework directly to organizational leadership, giving them the evidence base to decide which recommendations to act on.

The association left with a research-grounded roadmap and a clearer picture of what its next years could look like.

Domain: ProfessionalServices / Higher Education Adjacent Contributions: Membership Value Strategy, Mixed-Methods Research, Survey Design, Focus Groups, Stakeholder Interviews, Insight Synthesis, Workshop Facilitation, Problem & Opportunity Framing, Executive Presentation

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.

Santiago led the end-to-end service design work as project lead, research lead, and workshop facilitator, conducting one-on-one interviews with probation officers to document how they actually worked and where the current system was breaking down. He then designed, planned, and facilitated a series of in-person and virtual workshops to envision a modernized probation management experience, building shared alignment across business unit leaders who not agreed on a common direction before.

The outputs gave the technology team the service design foundation they needed to configure Salesforce accurately, and gave the organization something equally valuable: a shared vision for what the new experience needed to do for the people using it every day.

Domain: PublicSector / Justice Contributions: Service Design, User Research, Workshop Design and Facilitation, Journey Mapping, Service Blueprinting, Stakeholder Alignment, Salesforce Implementation Support, Knowledge Transfer

6. 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 tounderstand how its customers, auto dealerships managing vehicle inventory andfloor plan credit, actually worked.

Santiago led the research effort, conducting qualitative studies across the US to map customer behavior, surface friction, and identify what a mobile experience needed to do to be genuinely valuable. The findings shaped the product's core feature set and the UX design handed off to engineering.

The app launched natively in 2023 and has maintained an average rating above 4 stars across both major app stores – reflecting a product built around real user behavior, not assumptions.

Domain: Financial Services Contributions: Product Innovation & Strategy, Design Strategy, Market Research, Experience & Product-fit Research, Product Design

7. A Playbook That Helped a University Grow Without Losing Its Students
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Whena 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?

Santiago co-led the six-month research effort, conducting interviews with students, staff, and parents across the country and synthesizing the findings into a clear strategic direction. The output was a two-part strategy: a Student Success Playbook to improve how staff support students, and a Faculty and Staff Persona framework to raise the hiring bar.

The institution implemented both, modernizing its curriculum and reshaping its campus environments based directly on what research revealed.

Domain: Education Contributions: Ethnographic Research, Service Design, Service Innovation

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 timesomething changes. That was the problem at a major US and Canadian insurer, where benefit administrators were struggling through a fragmented and unintuitive experience.

Santiago led the design strategy within a broader digital transformation program, using generative research to identify root causes and evaluative testing to pressure-test the redesigned experience with actual users.

The work was designed to achieve 2 measurable goals: reduce call center volume by improving the self-service experience, and give benefit administrators a system that actually supports how they work.

Domain: Insurance Contributions: Product Innovation, Rapid Prototyping, Ethnographic Research, Experience & Product-fit Research, Business Transformation, Design Strategy

TESTIMONIALS

Testimonials from clients and colleagues.

"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

"I loved the in-person brainstorming session they did with the [nursing] staff. It was super engaging and practical. I appreciated having an outside perspective engage with us in that way and get the creative juices flowing on how we can create a greater sense of teamwork based on the feedback staff were given. It was super relevant and made intangible concepts tangible.." - Healthcare Client

"Where others face challenge in making it happen, you 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

“Santi showed up with passion, patient, and experience. His positive attitude got us out of sticky situations when the internal team was swirling. He stepped in to moderate and help us get aligned on a path forward. He did all of this while under less than ideal circumstances and turbulent times, which demonstrated his unwavering ability to find the best path regardless of the situation.” – Senior Director

“You’ve pioneered new methods of engaging with clients. You effectively converted a space on the third floor into “war rooms” for different client opportunities, displaying well-planned problem-solving and solution-framing approaches. Your strategies have been commended by your colleagues.” - Managing Director

“You finessed some skeptical clients and helped them see the impact of the research and empathetic service design you were undertaking. Our internal team were wowed by the output of your work and experience of working with you” – 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

Santiago
Caicedo

Santiago guides teams with strategic thinking, creative solutions, and captivating storytelling.

The previous case studies represent a fraction of Santiago’s diverse experience. His collaborative approach has benefited clients across a wide spectrum of other industries, including:

Passion as a driving force

User Advocacy

Visual Communication & Collaboration

Testimonials from clients and colleagues.

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