Stakeholder alignment and cross-functional collaboration

Summary

Collaboration across teams, functions, and vendors

Leading design in cross-functional product teams, partnering with stakeholders across departments, and working with external agencies and vendors has been a constant part of my work in UX. I've been the sole designer at a start-up working directly with the CEO and developers to build a new SaaS product, the in-house designer managing multiple external vendors, and the UX lead bringing SMEs, executives, and leads from other teams into alignment around a common goal.

Internal alignment

Aligning cross-functional teams to enhance the retirement experience at OTPP

In 2024, as Manager of UX & Creative at Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP), I led a cross-functional initiative to improve the online retirement journey for over 5,000 retiring teachers each year.

With only a few months before retirement season, scope and sequencing of the features were critical. Each solution touched a different team: the group building the status triggers, those implementing the automated emails, and those updating the member portal. Coordinating across multiple product owners, while also leading the UX team, required deliberate distance: close enough to support and coach, far enough to keep strategic priorities in focus.

One of the most important decisions I made was bringing the Insights & Data team in at the start. Their involvement helped us prioritize the highest-potential features with confidence, and meant we could report credibly on outcomes once retirement season closed. Because the enhancements touched both front-end experience and back-end workflows, I embedded contact centre staff early on: they helped us understand why members were calling, flagged inefficiencies in their own document follow-up workflows, and gave us feedback on proposed features. I kept them informed throughout, not just at milestones, so they were prepared for changes and avoided surprises at launch.

External partnerships

Directing discovery and external partners on the Parachute claims project

In 2022, as Director of UX & Marketing at Munich Re, I co-led the addition of digital self-serve claims functionality to the Parachute Insurance member portal.

While the Parachute platform offered a fully digital insurance buying experience, members still had to submit claims by phone or by mail. Because multiple product types coexisted in the member portal, designing the online claims feature meant collaborating across a more complex stakeholder landscape than previous projects.

The discovery phase required facilitating whiteboarding sessions with claims subject matter experts to map out the nuances across different product types. Spouse and child coverage, newly added dependents, and differences between the Canadian and US platforms all had to be accounted for without adding complexity to the user experience.

I wrote the UX requirements and provided the external agency with user flows, field details, and use cases to produce the wireframes.

As copy revisions and SME input continued to evolve, keeping the wireframes in sync became increasingly difficult, so I proposed bringing the Figma work in-house.

Working directly in Figma allowed us to iterate faster, incorporate stakeholder feedback without external delays, and maintain a single source of truth. It also reduced friction at handoff, and kept us in closer collaboration with the development team throughout sprint reviews and UAT.

Taira starts every project asking “why?” It’s this drive to understand the goal or problem behind a project/campaign that allows her to evaluate solutions and recommend a clear path forward. This paired with her stellar project management and communication skills makes her a great client to work with.

Kristen Boyd,

Former agency partner

Taira joined our Parachute B2C project in its early days and wore many hats as we laid the foundation for a global project and built our pilot websites. Her guidance on all things UX and SEO, attention to detail, and open collaboration style were instrumental to our successes.