Case Study · Design Leadership & Experience Strategy

Turning a fragmented onboarding ecosystem into one connected journey.

How leading experience strategy across Visa's client onboarding ecosystem moved it from a collection of disconnected products to a single, coherent journey, and shifted the organization around it.

Role
Design Leader, Experience Strategy
Scope
Cross product onboarding ecosystem
System
Client journey · Internal operations
Led alignment across
Product/Eng/Content/Research/Ops
Products referenced in this case study
Client facing 01
The guided journey

The product clients interact with throughout onboarding. It shows them where they are in the process and what comes next, whether that's completing a product information form, submitting a license request, or waiting for Visa to review a step before they can move on.

Internal · Visa team 02
The operations view

The tool Visa's team uses to direct the process from the inside, reviewing submitted forms and data, validating entries, tracking where each client stands, and deciding what happens next before the client can proceed.

Entry points Ops teams Systems Implementation Visibility Discover Onboard Implement Operate
← Before: fragmented ownership, multiple systems After: one connected client journey →
The Challenge

Onboarding wasn't one experience. It was several, stitched together badly.

Clients moved through multiple products and teams, each with its own ownership model, priorities, and level of visibility into the whole. The problem looked, at first, like a product problem. It wasn't. It was a journey problem, and no single team owned the journey.

01 Multiple entry points into onboarding
02 Multiple, disconnected systems
03 Different teams requesting the same information
04 Limited visibility into progress for clients
05 Inconsistent experience across products
06 Fragmented ownership across the journey
My Role

No one owns an entire ecosystem alone.

My contribution wasn't owning every decision, it was creating the shared direction that allowed dozens of decisions to move toward one experience.

Vision

Created and protected the end-to-end onboarding experience across client and operational journeys.

Principles

Defined the experience principles that guided product decisions, even under delivery pressure.

Alignment

Built shared direction across product, engineering, research and operations, without formal authority.

Enablement

Empowered the wider design team to own detailed design and execution once strategic direction was established.

The Approach

Five phases, in order: starting with the ecosystem, not the screen.

This wasn't a linear project plan so much as a widening lens: from one product, to the whole journey, to the organization around it.

Phase01

Understanding the ecosystem

Rather than starting with screens, the work started by mapping the end to end journey: how product, operations, and implementation teams actually interacted with clients, and where the friction, redundancies, and ownership gaps lived. A pattern emerged: the same client was routed through different experiences and ownership models depending on where they stood in the onboarding lifecycle.

Journey mapping · Stakeholder workshops
Phase02

Defining a future state vision

The vision: one onboarding experience instead of several disconnected ones. Clear ownership through the client lifecycle. Consistent patterns across products. Better visibility for clients. Less duplicated effort across teams. This reframed the question from "how do we improve a single product?" to "how do we improve onboarding as a whole?"

Experience vision · Journey framework
Phase03

The client facing experience

I established the client-facing journey as the entry point into onboarding while creating a mirrored operational view for Visa teams. More importantly, I aligned product, engineering, research and content around a shared experience direction that multiple teams could scale.

Cross functional design leadership
Phase04

Extending to the full lifecycle

With the guided journey established, the work extended to closing the gap where onboarding had historically ended and lifecycle management began, the point where clients had to navigate a separate set of tasks like license requests with little continuity from what came before. This shifted surrounding conversations from product centric to lifecycle centric.

Lifecycle strategy
Phase05

Organizational alignment

None of this held without alignment, and someone had to actually drive it. A significant share of the value here came from leading better decisions across teams: running workshops, negotiating competing priorities, translating customer insight into action, and holding stakeholders accountable to how their piece connected to the larger journey.

Workshop facilitation · Cross team alignment
Client onboarding journey

Proving four products could share one lifecycle, and mapping exactly where they can't.

A persistent question underneath the whole ecosystem effort: could different products actually follow the same stage by stage onboarding journey, or were they too different? Answering it required mapping each product individually, then overlaying them to test the hypothesis. The answer was yes, with a precise understanding of where and why divergence was unavoidable.

Product Lifecycle Map showing how four products navigate the same 8 shared stages, Sales Intent, Eligibility, Use Case, Compliance Review, Implementation, Testing, Go Live, and Billing, with divergence occurring only at Implementation and Testing where regulatory or irreversible commitments apply.
What the mapping revealed

All four products share the same eight stage anatomy. Divergence only occurs at two points, Implementation and Testing, where regulatory requirements, environment setup, or irreversible commitments force product specific paths.

Why it mattered

A shared structure meant onboarding could be governed, tracked, and experienced as one journey. Without this proof, every product team could argue for its own model, preventing any coherent client experience.

What this enabled

A single governance model for onboarding stage ownership. A shared language for status, decisions, and team responsibilities across all four products. And, critically, a foundation that made one connected client facing experience possible, because it proved the underlying structure already existed.

Design KPIs

Metrics that connect experience decisions to business outcomes.

These KPIs were designed to measure whether the experience was actually reducing friction for clients, not just whether features shipped. Each group addresses a specific business problem and tracks whether the design solved it.

01 · Discoverability & Awareness
Business problem
Fragmented discovery, lack of visibility
Experience solution
Clients can easily find, understand, and evaluate Visa solutions in one place, without support.
Solution discovery rate65 to 75%of active clients view at least one solution detail page from the hub
Time to discover solutionsUnder 3 minaverage from first visit to solution detail view
Catalog coverage engagementSessionsaverage number of unique solutions viewed per client session
02 · Relevance & Confidence in Decision Making
Business problem
Client confusion around relevance, prioritization
Experience solution
Clients understand which solutions are relevant and why they are recommended.
Solution evaluation depth2 to 4 minaverage time spent on a solution detail page
Recommended solution engagement25 to 40%clickthrough or detail view rate on Visa recommended solutions
Recommendation conversion rate15 to 25%of recommended solutions that progress from view to onboarding start
03 · Onboarding Clarity & Low Risk Entry
Business problem
Hesitation from unclear requirements, cost uncertainty
Experience solution
Clients clearly understand how to get started and feel confident initiating onboarding.
Onboarding initiation rate10 to 15%of solution detail views lead to onboarding start
Onboarding expectation clarity scoreQualpost onboarding survey: I understood what was required before I started
Onboarding confidence rate65% or moreof clients who review onboarding requirements proceed to start
04 · Onboarding Transparency & Progress Visibility
Business problem
Stalled onboarding, support dependency after start
Experience solution
Clients can easily track status, ownership, and next steps once onboarding begins.
Next step clarity rate90 to 95%of onboarding states clearly define the next action and owner. This is an experience quality bar, expectations should be high
Onboarding completion rate60 to 75%of onboarding starts reach activation readiness. Ambitious but defensible given better clarity and visibility
Time to activationDown 20 to 30%reduction in average time from onboarding start to activation
05 · Unified Experience & Reduced Support Dependency
Business problem
Fragmented tools, over reliance on sales and ops teams
Experience solution
Clients can move through discovery, onboarding, and activation without relying on manual support.
Self serve success rate50 to 65%of clients complete onboarding without sales or support intervention. Reflects true experience maturity, not just UI quality
Cross tool navigation rateUnder 2Product Hub initiated handoffs to other Visa tools per onboarding journey
Support deflection rateTrending downreduction in product related support tickets tied to discovery or onboarding

These KPIs were designed to measure whether the experience was reducing friction, not just whether features were built. Each metric has a direct line back to a client problem and a business outcome.

The Impact

What changed

Impact across three groups, because a journey problem only gets solved when the business, the client, and the team move together.

Business
  • Established a more holistic view of onboarding and lifecycle experiences
  • Influenced strategic conversations around journey ownership
  • Created journey frameworks reused across multiple products
  • Led alignment between product, operations, and implementation teams
Client
  • Reduced complexity in onboarding experiences
  • Improved visibility into onboarding activities
  • Delivered a more consistent experience across products and touchpoints
  • Advocated for client needs throughout product planning
Team
  • Led collaboration between previously disconnected groups
  • Created shared understanding of onboarding pain points
  • Introduced journey led thinking into strategic planning
  • Shifted teams from feature focused to experience focused decisions
I had the opportunity to collaborate with her on the Visa Launchpad design, and I was consistently impressed by her insightfulness and strong customer first mindset. She has a unique ability to bring concepts to life in ways that keep client needs at the center of every decision.
Product Manager of client facing tool
Reflection

What I'd do differently

If I ran this again, I'd push for a shared onboarding ownership model earlier in the process, rather than building alignment initiative by initiative. Getting the vision right was necessary but not sufficient. The harder, slower work was getting operations and implementation teams into the room before the future state direction was already drafted, not after. Alignment is cheaper before a vision exists than after people feel it's being handed to them. It's a pattern I've carried into how I approach every cross team effort since.

The Takeaway

What this work demonstrates

My contribution wasn't designing a better onboarding flow. It was helping the organization think about onboarding as one connected experience.

Start with the journey, not the screen

Understand the ecosystem before proposing solutions.

Connect goals to needs

Bring business objectives and customer needs into the same conversation.

Align teams around outcomes

Build shared ownership across product, ops, and implementation.

Build frameworks that scale

Create structures that outlive a single product or release.

Design as organizational tool

Use design to shift how teams work together, not only how a screen looks.

Leave a clearer path

The result: a more aligned organization and a clearer path for clients to reach their goals.