Enterprise platform design & process innovation
Workflow
UI/UX Design
UX Researcher
Synthesis
Process Design
My Role
UI/UX Designer
Design Process Innovator
Cross-Functional Facilitator
Team
Design Leadership
UX Designer, UX Writer
Senior Project Manager
Business Analysts
Developers
Scrum Masters
Timeline
18 months
Challenge
PwC's Client & Engagement Value Cycle processes client opportunities into engagements across all global territories, handling risk assessment, financial analysis, and recurring contract management. When I joined, the system faced significant challenges:
Fragmented Tools & Workflows
Multiple legacy applications (Easy Engage, Business Process Navigator) operated in silos, each with inconsistent interfaces and no unified design language. Global territories had built homegrown workarounds to fill gaps the systems didn't address.
Broken Design-Development Process
Designers delivered static mockups via screenshots. Developers received minimal documentation, no interaction details, and limited early involvement in decision-making. This created endless revision cycles, QA issues discovered too late, and a perception that design's role was merely "making things look nice."
Complex Global Requirements
With 12+ territories using systems differently due to local regulations and constraints, design decisions needed to account for diverse workflows—from engagement recurrence patterns to financial compliance requirements that varied by region.
Cultural Resistance
The team was reluctant to adopt new tools (Figma) and skeptical that changing established processes would improve outcomes. Business analysts dominated discussions, with design and development having limited strategic input.
Approach
PwC's Client & Engagement Value Cycle processes client opportunities into engagements across all global territories, handling risk assessment, financial analysis, and recurring contract management. When I joined, the system faced significant challenges:
I led research across 12 global territories, conducting video interviews with middle office teams who used Easy Engage daily—particularly for recurring engagements. Sessions were recorded and transcribed, with analysis in Condens to identify patterns and pain points.
Key Insights
Some territories had built sophisticated workarounds to address system limitations—studying these revealed critical missing functionality
Regional regulatory constraints (especially around financial compliance) created friction in recurrence workflows that the system didn't accommodate
Territories sharing middle offices had unique needs around engagement management that existing tools didn't support
These insights directly informed design priorities, helping me advocate for features that served real user needs rather than just business assumptions.
Recognizing that broken handoffs were creating as many problems as the tools themselves, I designed a comprehensive design-development workflow that transformed how teams worked together.
Designers created static mockups in Adobe XD, delivered them as PNG screenshots with no documentation, and developers built in isolation. Feedback came too late, QA discovered issues after development, and revision cycles were endless.
My new process introduced seven stages:
Briefing:
Business, design, and dev leaders align on complete requirements before sprints begin. Everything documented in Azure DevOps. Scope changes move to new sprints—forcing clarity upfront.
Sandbox:
Designers explore concepts in Figma, iterating through low-fidelity ideas before committing to high-fidelity solutions.
Feedback:
Weekly cadences where design presents to business AND developers. Meetings recorded for absent team members. Wireframes linked to ADO user stories, with 2-3 day async feedback window where all stakeholders comment directly in Figma. Major decisions documented in ADO.
Ready for Dev:
Final wireframes with complete annotations and interactive prototypes. Sectioned in Figma, linked in ADO, becomes source of truth for QA. Never changed once finalized.
Development:
Dev team builds from wireframes, prototypes, and documentation—with clear understanding of intended behavior and interactions.
QA:
Quality assurance references Ready for Dev wireframes as source of truth for validation.
Amendments:
If QA identifies critical issues requiring immediate fixes, new user story created. Designer copies Ready for Dev wireframes to Amendments section, makes changes, documents thoroughly, shares updated link.
I pitched this to product leadership, presenting the quality improvement and risk reduction case. Then I conducted workshops with development and business teams, teaching them Figma and explaining how the process would work. The key argument: slightly longer upfront time investment would dramatically reduce time-to-successful-completion by eliminating late-stage revisions.
Easy Engage Plus
Led design for initiative merging Business Process Navigator (opportunity tracking and validation) with Easy Engage (contract management) into one comprehensive platform managing the entire engagement lifecycle.
The complexity:
Consultants move opportunities through compliance checks, risk assessment, and financial analysis across multiple territories. Once approved, opportunities receive charge codes and become engagements. Middle office teams then manage these engagements—including recurring engagements that must be converted back to opportunities for renewal, then re-validated through the entire cycle. Every territory handles this differently due to local regulations.
What I designed:
Engagement lists with filtering, sorting, and recurrence marking capabilities
Extensive forms for editing engagement details during active periods and recurrence preparation
Line management features (each engagement contains multiple product lines with separate managers, codes, and information—sometimes linked, merged, added, or removed)
Validation notification system distinguishing between warnings (informational) and hard stops (requiring correction before proceeding)
I balanced feedback from global territories with strategic design priorities, conducting research to understand regional differences while maintaining scalable solutions. Due to company-wide financial constraints, my contract concluded before full development completion. However, the foundational research and design work established critical direction the team continued building on.
Validation Framework
Designed backend application extending across the entire CEVC, applied at federated and local levels for all global territories. Focused on two primary user roles—rule creators and rule validators—designing clear navigation, simple workflows, and information hierarchies to streamline validation processes and increase accuracy across engagement records.
AI Native Onboarding
Designed LLM-driven onboarding system consolidating multiple separate entry points (Source MDM, PMDM, Salesforce, among others) into single gateway with intelligent guide.
The problem:
Consultants working with multiple systems faced separate onboarding flows for each—multiple entry points, easy to get lost, no consistent experience.
The solution:
Single entry point with conversational AI guide. I made a critical interaction design decision: use conversational prompting for questions, guidance, and explanations (natural and personable), but switch to structured forms when collecting specific required information (faster and more straightforward than conversational back-and-forth).
This became the blueprint for company-wide AI application standards, establishing patterns for balancing conversational UI with traditional structured inputs based on user intent and task requirements.
Impact & Outcomes
I piloted the new design-development workflow on the iPaaS redesign project (internal API marketplace for developers). Measuring sprint velocity through Azure DevOps documentation, the process achieved:
10% faster delivery - Reduced time-to-successful-completion by catching issues early rather than in late-stage QA
25% improved design consistency - Better documentation and clearer handoffs resulted in fewer QA rounds
Developers gained strategic voice at business-dominated table during early stages
Design had stronger insight into technical constraints, informing more feasible decisions
More feedback loops and better communication alignment throughout development
Clearer documentation eliminated ambiguity and rework
After the iPaaS pilot success, I presented results to a UX director who championed the approach to PwC's Lean UX Center of Excellence (LUXCE). LUXCE members refined their own processes using elements of my framework. I collaborated with a scrum master to enhance the ADO documentation approach, and the process was adopted for Easy Engage Plus and influenced practices across multiple design teams company-wide.
Beyond individual project contributions, I:
Mentored junior designers on the team
Partnered with UX writers to maintain consistent communication across platforms
Facilitated cultural shift toward collaborative design-development partnership
Advocated for user research and balanced rapid delivery with design rigor
Served on LUXCE, contributing to company-wide design standards and maturity