2021
Experience OKR Development
Design Lead
Strategy, Facilitation, Organizational Design
On average, Northwestern Mutual brings in around 2,500 new candidates every year. During a Candidate's first year, they rely heavily on learning material, training, and mentorship to expedite their ability to establish a client base and begin their journey as a financial advisor.
Even though Northwestern attracts a large number of recruits into their candidate pipeline, only 60% of those original candidates remain as Advisors after their first year and a mere 15% are left at the end of their third year. My challenge was to facilitate alignment between product and business stakeholders on Objectives and Key Results related to the Candidate's learning journey and the national training program.
Out of respect for the client's privacy, I can't share many details about this project. I do want to emphasize my gratitude for Northwestern Mutual for allowing me to take part in strategic planning, user testing, workshops, and allowing me to play a part in shaping the future of their organization.
I created an approach to working with product, business, and design stakeholders through synchronous and asynchronous workshopping methods to leverage time, energy, and focus efficiently. The first phase was convergent and was used to generate a broad range of information around problem areas and potential OKRs.
Using Miro, I created the first of 3 OKR development workshops to help separated and siloed stakeholders discuss, align, generate, and agree on candidate learning goals.
I provided a flexible scaffolding that could adapt to the experience level of the participants to provide key problems or potential OKRs that they had already considered.
I find joy in post-workshop synthesis, eagerly delving into each thought to uncover connections among a vast array of insights. Independently, I grouped, identified patterns, and constructed thematic areas aligned with user problem areas defined in the initial workshop stage.
Through the grouping process and frequent share outs, the larger group of stakeholders helped to refine the groupings, names, and eventually the list of potential Objectives.
Each prospective experience objective was mapped to a problem area grouping to base the potential experience goals on problem areas that were known pain points to the user.
Through a final series of asynchronous alignment exercises I asked the stakeholder group to prioritize the list of potential objectives to create alignment among the group, then generate performance indicators for the most important objectives.
By utilizing a convergent and divergent workshopping methods, I created collaboration, understanding, and agreement on Objectives and Key Results that would define product, business, and design direction.
I asked the participants to cast color coded votes across the list of potential OKRs to gather consensus about which OKRs should be: Now, Next, or Later to focus efforts.
I took the objectives in the 'Now' category and asked the stakeholder group to generate how they may be measured now or additional KPIs they would want to measure.
Through the OKR development workshops, I was able to narrow the stakeholder focus and efforts to point towards defining the core learning experience once they enter the candidate pipeline and through their first year as an advisor.
As a result of this work, the collective stakeholder group aligned and prioritized efforts related to their quarterly goals. Unfortunately, I was resourced to another project before seeing the completion of the final service map and user journey. Since the end of this project, I have stayed in touch with my client Product Manager and have heard that the artifacts that I created have helped the design team point to specific segments of the experience to continue refining and improving.
During this portion of the year-long engagement, my role fluctuated between an independent contractor, facilitator, and design strategist. I orchestrated moments of alignment through delightful and challenging conversations, deployed OKR development frameworks for fragmented and siloed teams, and created design concepts to promote ideation.
I learned a great deal about managing stakeholder relationships, creating design-led innovations based on user research, adapting priorities to various constraints, and aligning UX design to direct business goals.
