The Challenge

The operational communications team at USAA wanted to ground their 5-year vision and strategy in a deep understanding of the processes, people, and technologies that support the creation, generation, delivery, capture, storage, and analysis of billions of communications across multiple channels, but had limited visibility into opaque legacy systems, siloed teams, and poorly documented processes.

My Role

I served as a lead on this effort, collaborating on the development of a comprehensive research plan, interviewing more than 60 employees in technical roles, documenting highly complex interlocking systems, and generating insights to inform ideation on ideal state.

Outcomes

Providing comprehensive documentation of pain points by technology, team, and journey stage allowed for easy integration of recommendations into product managers' feature roadmaps and budget requests along with quick action on low-hanging fruit. Our holistic approach to understanding current state was a powerful proof of concept on the ability of research to reduce siloing and increase cooperation and collaboration across teams, while the concrete, prioritized, actionable ideas for solutions generated during our alignment and ideation workshop provided a foundation for leadership’s 5-year vision.

Activities

• Discovery and stakeholder alignment: I led discovery efforts, conducting SME interviews and secondary research to better understand current state and define the goals of the research effort. From there, I co-facilitated a successful stakeholder alignment session to lock down the research objectives and plan. 

• Individual in-depth interviews: Conducted more than 60 interviews with internal resources, including business unit employees in various functions as well as IT and infrastructure experts developing and maintaining associated technologies.

• Group interviews: Conducted 10+ group interviews with internal customers to better understand their needs, motivations, delights, and pain points.

• Synthesis and sense-making: Coded and analyzed thousands of notes, integrating system maps and other technical documentation, to generate a series of actionable insights that identified pain points and opportunity areas.

• Future state workshop and ideation: Presented key research findings to align stakeholders on current state as part of a two-day alignment and ideation workshop with business unit leadership, employees, and internal customers. Facilitated ideation and prioritization efforts for future state.

Deliverables

• Insights readout: Defined four key insights on the impacts of issues like manual processes, technology gaps, and siloing across the teams.

• Impact assessment by team: While the four key insights offered a high-level overview of opportunity areas, we needed to go deeper. Every insight was complemented by a detailed assessment of specific impacts to each team (IT, internal employees, internal customers, and customer service reps).

• Journey map/service blueprint: Created detailed, actionable artifacts that documented the end-to-end operational communications journey, including associated systems and technologies, key personnel, and pain points by journey stage. 

• Technology-specific opportunity areas: Documented pain points and wishlist items for over a dozen separate technologies associated with operational communications.

• Prioritized ideas for improvement: Facilitated ideation and prioritization sessions for future state, documented workshop outcomes, delivered prioritized recommendations to stakeholders.