Leading design across the acquisition journey

Context

I led design across a major U.S. bank’s acquisition journey, from product discovery to account opening across digital and employee-assisted channels. My work focused on improving continuity for customers and giving designers a more effective way to deliver across that journey.

The experience depended on how teams worked together. I grew my team from 2 to 30 — through expanding my responsibilities and hiring — and evolved our approach to ownership and collaboration: I learned from an initial model that created too much coordination work, and refined it around the realities of delivery.

My role

I led experience strategy and the design operating approach, partnered with marketing, product, engineering, and risk leaders, and brought customer insight and funnel performance into decisions about the work. My responsibility was to maintain a view of the complete experience while enabling teams to deliver their part of it — and to develop the leaders who could carry that responsibility with me.

The challenge

Customers arrive with an expectation that what they learn while exploring a product will remain true when they apply. They may move from a campaign to a product page or continue with help from an employee. Each transition needs to preserve clarity about the product, eligibility, and what happens next.

Different parts of the experience had evolved separately. Language and interaction patterns could vary across touchpoints, leaving customers to make connections that the experience should have made for them. Improving individual pages would only address part of the problem. We also needed a better way to coordinate the work between them.

Learning from the first approach

My initial approach emphasized end-to-end ownership of the customer journey. The intent was to give designers more continuity across the experience and make it easier to see how a decision at one stage affected the next.

That approach created demands we had underestimated. Our delivery partners continued to work through different planning cycles and priorities. Designers spent more time coordinating across those differences, with less time available for the design work itself.

I had placed too much weight on the ideal shape of the customer journey and too little on the relationships required to deliver it. The experience still needed end-to-end attention, but the way we organized that attention had to change.

Refining the approach

I adjusted the approach so design responsibilities worked more naturally with established delivery relationships. At the same time, I strengthened the shared patterns and cross-journey perspective needed to keep the customer experience coherent.

This meant being deliberate about which decisions could be made close to the work and which needed to remain consistent across touchpoints. Teams needed room to respond to their delivery context, alongside common expectations for language, accessibility, and interaction patterns.

I continued to own the broader view of acquisition performance with our cross-functional partners. That helped us discuss friction across the journey, including places where progress within one touchpoint could obscure a problem at the next.

Building the organization to carry it

The refined approach only worked if the people closest to each part of the journey could genuinely own it. That meant growing leaders, not just headcount.

Four directors, all developed from within. Each of the directors who now lead a part of the acquisition journey was promoted from inside the organization. I gave them progressively larger scope as they earned it, coached them through the partner relationships and trade-offs that come with it, and made the step to director an expectation the whole org could see, not an exception.

Delegated responsibility. As each director grew into the role, I handed over what I had been holding myself: the relationship with their marketing, product, and engineering counterparts; the design roadmap and prioritization for their area; hiring, performance, and promotion within their teams; and critique and sign-off on the work. Decisions moved closer to the work and to the people who understood its delivery context best.

What that freed me to do. With directors owning their areas end to end, my own attention could stay on the whole journey — the seams between areas, the shared standards, and the view of acquisition performance we held with our partners — which is where the continuity problem actually lived.

How the organization improved. Directionally: people stayed, with regretted attrition low through a period of rapid growth; there was a visible path upward, with leads becoming directors and designers becoming leads; and delivery got faster and steadier, with fewer escalations reaching me and stronger feedback from partners.

Putting the approach into practice

Keep the customer promise consistent. We improved continuity between product information, promotional experiences, and account opening. Shared language and patterns helped customers understand requirements and carry their expectations into the application, including when they moved between digital and employee-assisted experiences.

Make good decisions reusable. We strengthened shared design patterns, content guidance, and accessibility expectations so teams could build on established decisions. This reduced the need to revisit common problems each time an offer or experience changed.

Use insight across the journey. Customer insight and funnel analytics gave us a common way to examine the experience with our partners. This kept attention on the transitions customers encountered and helped connect local design decisions to the broader acquisition journey.

What changed

The work contributed to improvements in both the experience and the way we delivered it:

• Improved progression from promotional experiences into application starts, with reduced abandonment at key application steps
• Faster delivery of new offers and variants through shared patterns
• A lighter coordination burden for designers and more time for design work
• A clearer, shared view of acquisition performance across touchpoints

These outcomes are described directionally; specific performance figures are not included in this public case study.

What I would carry forward

I would examine delivery relationships and coordination demands earlier, alongside the customer journey. A model can make sense from the customer’s perspective and still create too much overhead for the people expected to deliver it.

The lesson I carry forward is to hold the customer experience steady as the goal while remaining willing to change how the work gets done. Effective design leadership includes noticing when an approach is placing the burden on the team, acknowledging that, and adjusting it.

The revised approach helped teams work within their delivery context while taking shared responsibility for the continuity customers experience.

Related

• One system from browsing to banking
• A homepage built around what clients come to do