Design and Strategy Leadership

Merrill Guided Investing is a goal-based investment product offering from Merrill Lynch which combines the best features of robo-advisors with the confidence of professional human management. Our team at Digitas (GroupeConnect) was instrumental in envisioning the client experience and launching the MVP product in 2018. We continued to work with their development team in an agile process to roll out new product offerings, features and goals.

As the director of experience strategy, I was responsible for managing the strategic design process by developing short, medium, and long-term strategies for continuing to drive the experience forward. I provided strategic guidance and leadership on customer experience and product design and supervised the UX team in their support of the agile development process and their exploration of future state designs.

• We created the vision for a new MGI Advised Affluent Offering (AAO) product offering and helped the Merrill Edge core product team get board approval to move forward with product development.

• My team developed the experience engagement model and initial end-to-end client advisor workflow including new client on-boarding.

• Based on the success of the product launch, my team was brought on to augmented the MGI product teams by providing best-in-class design and strategy principles to the entire product life cycle.

• Our embedded agile team were integral parts of quarterly planning meetings and provided upfront designs and experience strategy for sprints while working directly with the Merrill tech and product teams.

• Used quantitative and qualitative testing to continually refine the MGI value proposition and move clients through on-boarding.

• Worked with MGI client experience team to evolve the product experience after launch and continued to envision the future of the Merrill Edge unified client experience.