Morningstar Experience Strategy & Design

By the end of the year sometimes, I’ve got that thousand-mile stare going and not much left in the tank. But I sold this strategy, consulting and planning engagement in October, and I was on the hook as the agency lead to deliver it, before Christmas.

It turned out this may have been my favorite engagement of 2022 for a number of reasons:

• I was the BD lead and early relationship lead

• I stayed on as both a creative and strategy team lead and also a horsepower role—ripping wires, performing site and competitive analysis, writing decks and presenting and selling our work week-over-week

• I really liked the clients too, which always helps

We had our goal:

But we didn’t have a bench and properly-cast teammates were tough to come by in November.

We started with the team we had, and worked through a 6-7 week process that looked like this:

Stakeholder interviews, site and competitive analysis, narrative/storytelling analysis, design principles, and a foundational system design of L1, L2 and L3 wireframes. All of the UX work was proofed across a handful of POC visual design, to ensure the work works within the Morningstar Design System. Here’s a few grabs:

L1: Direct Landing

L2: Data Landing

L3 Detail

Additionally, we delivered a working plan for how to move into prototyping, user testing and Detailed Design in 2023: 4 weeks prototyping and testing, followed by three, 3-week batches of Detailed Design, with three lean tests along the way.

It was a 7-week hustle, but in the end, we delivered a robust, tight, sharp and smart body of work to be proud of…and the clients were thrilled too!

A product manager, experience lead and a CD walk into a bar...

We met with the Northern Trust SVP of Product to hear about a digital challenge for their business: Fees, and specifically, the myriad of places across their ecosystem where fees content is published upstream, and how clients see and understand bank fees content downstream.

We’re creating a proposed for a small, sharp, pilot engagement and team for Q1 2023.

A Product Manager, an Experience Lead and a CD, with expertise in current/future state process mapping, service blueprinting, personas and journeys.

We’ll identify the dozens of places fees content lives today (and how it’s published) and provide a plan to systematize and digitize and move away from high-error-rate manual processes, as well as a single, simple digital dashboard-view for clients.

Under the radar of another agency!

Based on the work we completed in March, we were introduced to another group at Morningstar, Direct.

We had an intro meeting, then another, and another, then learned there was another agency in there already, performing a global design system engagement.

Still, we were able to reshape the third pitch, to focus more on UX and Content Strategy, for the win!

We started a Define Phase late Q4, with target finish date of 12/21.

Richer engagement for clients—deeper data-driven insights for EY.

We’ve got a big opportunity to showcase the foundational Experience Design Platform and Experience Management Platform to the wavespace business leaders, and illustrate a vision for how to take the platform from a utility platform to a world-class client/business digital consulting platform in 2023.

We’re investing heavily in this pitch, including spec design and a proof-of-technology solution or Hello World moment, to proof our thinking and ensure we can achieve the vision.

Pitch is slated for January 17! 60 minutes on the clock—we’ll have a great story about the future…

and some tablets in room too, to prove the art of the possible is possible.

It’ll be a tough crowd I think—I met some of them last year on Zoom (and was a little scared!). Super sharp EY consultants incredulous of the work done to date or our ability to envision the future. The works good and proofed, and we’ve till 1/17 to shape the 45 minutes we’ll have to make the case.

I need help!

I wrote my first pitch for NT on December 6, 2021, on a Delta flight home from a Six Flags pitch in Arlington, TX.

We met with prospects in January, and again and again and again, through June 2022.

And with each meeting, made incremental progress, discussing their digital journeys—the first of which was called I Need Help—a customer support journey.

Sometimes, it’s a slow burn.

But we did it, and in Q3 2022, we finally put together our first Mobiquity engagement with Northern Trust.

It’s not quite my favorite because it’s a Team as a Service model and feels a little staff-aug-style, but it was a start, and a quite sizable one, at that.

I’ve begun meeting some new folks at Northern Trust now, and there could be a new opp on the horizon…which is probably six months from now ;)

from project to program: MVP1 grows to MVP2.

With MVP 1 (EDP/Experience Design Platform) almost complete, we set our sights on MVP2, the integration of a platform EY calls the EMP, or Experience Management Platform.

If we can unify both, we will have created a fully functional digital platform that operationalizes the wavespace platform for EY and serves as a foundational platform upon which we could create and build any number of richer applications and experiences (for clients and the business) in 2023.

We solutioned a 4-week Define Phase, 9 weeks of Detailed Design and 6 sprints of engineering—a team comprised of almost 30 resources from strategy, UX, Design and Engineering—set to begin in August and launch the new product by end of January 2023.

this break…is a break up

I hate the end.

I leave windows and doors just a touch ajar at home—open, possible.

Never been good at break-ups, even the one’s where ‘it was them, not me’, so as we neared the 4th batch of Detailed Design, I had the uneasy feeling like before someone says, ‘we need to talk’.

The clients were sharp, expert, fun, bright and easy to work (which is not always the case, and sometimes agency people forget what a beaut that is).

Q1 2022 was Detailed Design for Morningstar Indexes, and it was March! We’d made sitemaps and dozens of wireframes, nav schemas and mobile and desktop homepages, category landing pages and campaign landing pages, and we were ready to turn over our baby, as theirs.

I’m hoping Morningstar swipes right because I really like them, and I think there’s a ton that strategy, product design and a committed team could do with them.

Thanks to the three S’s at Morningstar, and to Mobiquity leadership of Elisha, and A-team Rob, John and Michael.

Travelers...for more 5-star action...or not!

We’d created the TRV mobile app in 2020, taking the Travelers 2.4 star app to a 4.9 star app, so pitching for some new DTC responsive web work felt like a great fit.

Until I learned they were speaking with 10 vendors!

Two or three competitors is fine, but 10 potentials is really just entertaining the feckless fantasies of teams without much to do, but mine the agency world for ideas.

Nevertheless, we went for it., and teed up the opportunity.

And after several meetings, we lost, to my old parter Steph, and my old boss, Barry, at Merkle.

I was kind of crushed for a bit, but may the best team win!

NOTE: 8 months later, Travelers has yet to engage in the work with their new agency, so maybe it was a windmill, after all.

Write what you know (or best you can)

EY wavespace Digital Product Engineering begins!

I’m not an engineer, but I’m pretty good at shaping and solutioning engagements outside of my domain, that are buyable and sellable, and I’ve come a long way since describing anything not related to strategy, experience or design as ‘connecting the pipes’.

I partnered with our Chief Portfolio Architect and Delivery and Account leads to shape, solution, present and sell 2 squads across 10 sprints for MVP 1 engineering of the wavespace experience design platform.

Research, personas, journeys and service blue-prints, sitemaps and detailed, annotated, dev-ready responsive designs were finally coming to life.

MVP 1 development will turn an older, manual system of creating a wavespace into a digital system that allows elite, design thinking experience managers and designers to review digitized activity catalogs and create a run-of-show schedules for their time with clients—reviewing . Users can review previous wavespace activity and see how others like them, run wavespaces.

The experience over the last 12+ months has been a ton of learning for me—about EY and their culture and critical stakeholder tours and presentations along the journey—and all from three distinct roles: BD lead, CD (internally) and an Executive Sponsor, across planning, research, strategy and POC-design. I think this is still my favorite agency role—early work in BD and relationship building, but also some mortar around the thing early, in Define & Design. Staying on and managing the team and the clock in Delivery helps me check the sometimes BS of BD.

Sometimes, there’s a belief that because technology (or cloud or managed services or even staff aug) is different than strategy or design, that it should be proposed and presented differently. I don’t tend to agree. I wrote and presented and sold in the same, known and tame manner, we have for the past year plus of Strategy, Definition, Planning and Product Design engagements. A good story works, regardless of the hero.

With dev-ready, annotated responsive designs at the ready, let the dev begin!

Rubik's Relationship

ILLUSTRATION: TOMASZ WALENTA

An agency/client relationship is a puzzle, and kind of one that can never be solved.

Maybe it’s like this:

Side 1: We had a great intro meeting.
Side 2: We came back with a great pitch proposal.
Side 3: We revised the proposal until it worked for everyone.
Side 4: We moved to SOW and got that all worked out.
Side 5: We kicked off a great define phase
Slide 6: We’re moving into design & engineering; this is great.

Puzzle solved!

But suddenly:

• The client has less money than intended.

• There’s a new procurement guy.

• Our contact quit and the new contact has another agency pal.

• It’s Monday, someone changed their mind.

The puzzle’s never solved for long. Solve it, celebrate the win, and plan to solve it again and again.