Lead Product Designer

While the National Pandemic raged on in our backyard, the disruption put many business initiatives on hold for the Verizon Up program. This allowed the design team to regroup and brainstorm what we wanted to work on with this clean slate.

We quickly tasked ourselves optimizing the redemption process for rewards. Verizon Up’s core value prop is the ability for loyal customers to claim and use rewards which range the spectrum of Verizon products, accessories, partner discounts and gift cards. However, through our previous initiatives we had gathered a plethora of feedback on the quality of user experience of this process we inherited. This became the opportunity! Not only would we be able to work on an experience our team had been itching to fix, we could also meet overall business goals like increase customer satisfaction (jNPS) as well as position the design team as a strategic partner within our collaborative core team.

My responsibility became to define the opportunity, reveal the rationale, and work with partners to put the project on the Verizon Up roadmap. This was an opportunity to use my skills as a design strategist and a core partner to deliver and sell the end-to-end plan for this project which included the double diamond methodology, project list, phase 1 projects roadmap and how we planned to work with our partners. Our business partners were impressed with our passion for the project, our thoughtful plan, and our collaborative nature. They approved phase 1 of our strategy and set off on defining business impacts and budgets.

I looped in our research partners very early on in the planning phase, as I knew they were integral to our process. We worked together to create a plan for research which included Diary Studies, a new method to our research. These provided rich insightful qualitative data that we took further by inviting 15 of those participants to be interviewed. While we attended all the interviews, I also had my team work on comparative and competitive audits and friction point analysis while I gathered and analyzed existing verbatim customer feedback, understanding the reward partnerships and existing business logic, as well as interviewed stakeholders and various partners.

After the interview results readouts were delivered, I led my team to create persona’s specific to this project. After, I led two ideation sessions, one with my design team and a second with the stakeholders and partners that was based on the results of the first ideation session. I also held a workshop with the same stakeholders and partners to define success metrics.

Based on our research, ideation sessions and success metrics workshop we decided to create two individual concepts capturing various ideas and test them against the current standard experience. The results were astounding, not only was there a clear preference from customers for a simplified guided experience, but also all customers explicitly expressed that the current standard experience needed to be removed. We took these results to our stakeholders and partners (including development team) to discuss feasibility, business risks, and collaborate on the optimizations for approval.

Phase 1, which included the simplification and optimization of the redemption process and the redesign of screens within those flows, was completed and handed off to our development partners. Per our current process we also VQA’ed the development deliveries as well. I was also responsible for socializing the new improvements as well as working with our marketing partners to make sure communications were properly updated.

Today, the project was released into production. Prior to this day, our business partners approved Phase 2 which has been kicked off and is in our define phase. Our partners look forward not only for the delivery of phase 2 but also already making plans for phase 3.