OTPP & Munich Re
2016 - 2025
Collaborated across teams, stakeholders, and vendors: internal alignment and external partnerships
Cross-functional partners I’ve worked with:
Internal teams
Department leaders Product and Scrum Engineering Data and insights Marketing Customer support
Internal alignment
Aligning cross-functional teams to enhance the retirement experience at OTPP
Leading the project across product teams
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.
Teams I worked with on the retirement enhancements initiative
Partnering with Insights & Data
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.
Maintaining constant communication
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
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.
Facilitating discovery with SMEs and legal counsel
The discovery phase required whiteboarding sessions with insurance SMEs and Munich Re's Canadian claims team to examine the US flow and identify regional and product differences. Regulatory differences between Canada and the US also required consultations with multiple internal stakeholders and our Canadian legal counsel, adding complexity to what initially seemed like a straightforward project.
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, which worked with a translation vendor and maintained Confluence pages with English and French content 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.
