Leading cross-functional teams and initiatives

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 career. 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.

Directing discovery and external partners on the Parachute Insurance claims project

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

Facilitating discovery with SMEs and legal counsel

The claim submission flow needed to accommodate the different information required by health and life insurance products, while following the existing US member portal flow to leverage development work already in place. Discovery required whiteboarding sessions with insurance SMEs and Munich Re's Canadian claims team to compare the US flow against Canadian requirements and identify where it needed to diverge. What initially looked like a straightforward project, built on an existing pattern, became more complex once regulatory differences between the two countries required lengthy consultations with multiple internal stakeholders and legal counsel.

User flow I created after whiteboarding sessions with claims SMEs

Directing an external UX agency

I wrote the UX requirements and provided the agency with user flows, field details, and use cases covering all product and coverage combinations. Working closely with the agency through multiple rounds of feedback and iteration, we refined the wireframes to account for the Canadian product nuances identified during discovery.

Partnering with the development vendor throughout delivery

After approving the wireframes, my colleague and I collaborated on producing the Figma mockups in-house. I also led the content team, working with a translation vendor and ensuring English and French content was ready before each development sprint. I attended end-of-sprint showcases and participated in UAT to confirm designs and copy were implemented correctly in both languages. The Canadian first-notice-of-claim functionality launched in February 2022, the result of close collaboration across an internal UX team, insurance SMEs, legal counsel, and external UX, translation, and development vendors.

Leading multi-team initiatives at Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan

Coordinating across teams for retirement journey optimizations

As Manager of UX & Creative at 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 were critical: each solution touched a different team, from the group building status triggers to those implementing automated emails and 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.

Teams I worked with on the retirement enhancements initiative

Aligning designers and developers around a new design system

Members moving from OTPP's public site into their secure portal experienced a jarring shift: sections of the portal had been designed at different times with varying alignment to the brand, and accessibility issues on mobile added further friction. I championed and led the creation of a design system to bring coherence across both, making the case to our product owner for investing team time in it despite competing project deadlines.

Each of the eight designers on my team researched best practices for their assigned components and presented options to the group; we collectively chose the final versions and finalized them in Figma. To support implementation, the team also produced sample code, including HTML, CSS, and ARIA labels, and we identified champions on the development team to help drive consistent adoption.

The design system gave designers a clear guide to follow and developers a reliable source of truth, making collaboration faster and reducing the corrections needed at every implementation. More importantly, it shifted how the team worked: designers began thinking beyond individual screens to design for the system as a whole.

Design system components in use

Partnering with Data & Insights to surface insights at scale

I also partnered with the Data & Insights team to integrate AI into our research workflows. I developed the custom taxonomy used to analyze member call transcripts and web intercept survey responses through a secure ChatGPT Enterprise tool. We iterated on the taxonomy and prompts until I was satisfied with the AI's categorization, before rolling the tool out and training the team to use it.

This collaborative effort helped surface member pain points at scale, reduced manual synthesis time, and unlocked call transcripts as a new source of insight to help inform service improvements going forward.

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.