Design is valuable because it offers a unique lens into understanding humans; it enables us to hear past statements and into human needs. At USAA, it is particularly meaningful because we're able to call upon the mission as motivation.
Meriah Garrett
Chief Design Officer, USAA
Chief Design Officer Meriah Garrett helped us sequence even more of the traits that enable USAA to make great design happen, from inside the trenches with service members and their families. We also spoke with Vice President of Design Sherie Masters, Executive Director of Design Language Systems Caleb Schmidt, and Executive Director of Design Greg Storey to look inside the practices and processes that make USAA prepared to scale design.
We have banking, insurance, and investments—but it’s really this holistic idea of making a person, a family, a whole unit more financially secure. That's a very complex and emotional space.
Meriah Garrett
Chief Design Officer, USAA
Leaning on new team models to scale
One major practice that sets USAA apart is its experience-owner model. As part of their Human Centered approach, the Design Education team provides Experience Owners a two-day bootcamp tailored to grow their design thinking skills. Instead of referring to these partners as product owners, they’re known internally as experience owners, who live and own the product and all touchpoints from a more holistic view.
Once upon a time, product ownership was just owning the P&L. We've tried to go through a transformation to get our business partners to think about all of their touch points.
Meriah Garrett
Chief Design Officer, USAA
For technical design consistency, a “representative” from the Design Language System team is embedded on every product team. According to Executive Director of Design Greg Storey, USAA has DLS representatives in each office location too. The representative attends meetings about element or feature changes, or new developments in the system as a whole.
Everything we design goes through a DLS review to make sure we’re not creating any exotic components, and also to make sure it’s following the style and spirit of the language.
Greg Storey
Executive Director of Design, USAA
Scorecards are a common reporting mechanism at USAA, so the design organization is developing and rolling out a design-specific scorecard that details everything from engagement with compliance and legal, to the accessibility of the design program. This concept also helps monitor the percentage of requests coming in at the team layer versus the portfolio layer—which helps the design organization as a whole plan for long-term balance.
Developing talent to build robust practice areas
Another unique aspect of USAA that contributes to better product experiences is the company’s support and development of individual designers. A dedicated Talent team works with the Human-centered Design practice to develop a skills matrix that supports designers at all levels, so experiences are composites of diverse skill sets and backgrounds. Then, 6–8-person design pods are deployed within the lines of business to work on specific projects.
Individuals on these teams aren’t expected to be “Swiss Army Knife” designers; they’re given clear career paths, coaching, and support. They may work on one large project, or a collection of work across a broad area like “banking.” Directors are then able to assemble balanced teams however they prefer.
When designers were all lone rangers, each person felt like they had to be the Swiss Army Knife. In reality, you're not always the best visual designer—you might be really good at information architecture. [With this new structure], you can lean on each other to augment your skills, to come together and critique, to come together and brainstorm, to perform the zoom-in and out zoom-out activity that's important when you want to be at the table for planning and strategy.
Meriah Garrett
Chief Design Officer, USAA
Changing the planning cycle and even the way USAA funds work has made a tremendous impact on the design practice. Meriah Garrett likens the process of enabling this forward movement to turning a ship in frozen ice—before setting a new course with an agile framework, the team had to make many small changes over time.
We're specifically using the scaled agile framework to have a program and portfolio layer that helps us get an increment ahead, and have design and architecture resources help inform planning from a business standpoint.
Meriah Garrett
Chief Design Officer, USAA
Moving away from waterfall to a more agile, human-centered design process has enabled USAA to create desirable experiences by reducing the planning time involved in new projects. Caleb Schmidt, Director of Design Language Systems, says adaptive planning on a quarterly basis allows the team to flex in some areas, and reevaluate others to prioritize business objectives and funding with current design needs.
It's all one change that’s taking us from a Gregorian planning cycle, waterfall execution, and handoff-driven organization, to an agile, digital, human-centered data-driven operation.
Meriah Garrett
Chief Design Officer, USAA
Process
1. SAFe agile - Within the SAFe agile framework new work starts at the portfolio level. At this stage, there’s an emphasis on divergent thinking and making sure the focus is on the right problems.
2. Research - Generative, iterative research is conducted with USAA members. The team intentionally mixes quantitative and qualitative data to understand both the what and the why.
Design has been around at USAA, but it was previously hidden, tucked into IT. IT would say, ‘Hey we’re building a thing, you should make it look great.’ Now, design is more ahead of the whole process, and able to do things like generative human research.
Greg Storey
Executive Director of Design, USAA
3. Making and Prototyping - Teams begin to iteratively increase the fidelity of their ideas from sketches and storyboards, to screens and flows, that can be evaluated by stakeholders and members.
By working ahead of the team layer where implementation happens, we’re able to do the right level of research with members that tells us if this idea is something we should really be driving toward, if it’s something that connects back to our mission of financial security for the member.
Caleb Schmidt
Executive Director of Design Language Systems, USAA
4. Evaluate - Based on feedback from members, IT, architecture partners, and digital and data teams, experience owners make the decision to proceed with the SAFe agile process or pause.
5. Member Preview Group - A Member Preview Group helps inform the broader release, but shipping a product or new feature depends on its potential risk or impact, and whether it’s new or existing.
Org design
A hybrid approach, which is common in large enterprises, blends multiple organizational models and run different models in parallel. In hybrid structures, an organization might position designers in a temporary cross-functional team to work on a focused project with a clear deadline. When they’re done, they return to the centralized design team.
- Centers of Excellence - Five practice areas, referred to as the Centers of Excellence, house designers and specific functions under leadership of the vice president of design.
- Design Language System Team - Headed by Caleb Schmidt, it's the largest practice groups with two functions: building USAA’s design language, and design support and enablement across the company.
Another common hybrid model strategy is to distribute designers in cross-functional teams, but pull them back together for design reviews, stand-ups, and fireside chats, which helps designers maintain peer connection even when isolated teams dominated by engineers.
Many large companies position the design system team as the hub of design culture to which embedded designers return for discussion about creating a unified customer experience across platforms and products.
The majority of our resources are what I kind of call 'deployed teams.' And those deployed teams are aligned to the lines of business and the enterprise, and then break down according to that business taxonomy.
Meriah Garrett
Chief Design Officer, USAA
- The Human-centered Design team prioritizes companywide understanding of design thinking and human-centered design principles, while also running an internal d.School of sorts to deliver guided practice to employees.
- USAA has three major lines of business: Bank, Property & Casualty, and Financial Advice Services Group. In each of these lines, producers and designers are parallel positions that report to a director.
Compliance is huge in our company. We do not step forward without making sure we're checking that box.
Sherie Masters
Vice President of Design, USAA
The other three teams making up the Centers of Excellence are Design Research, Talent, and Service Design.
Everyone in a practice area is frankly very accomplished in their specific expertise. Then, they work with our design teams to make sure they're approaching a given challenge the right way, with the right processes, and with the right practices behind it.
Sherie Masters
Vice President of Design, USAA
In design practice we don't own all of design within USAA—there's no way we could do that. So we look for different ways to scale our expertise across design teams and sister teams, primarily by helping people learn new skills and learn what ‘good’ looks like.
Sherie Masters
Vice President of Design, USAA
Tool stack
How USAA uses InVision
- Low-fidelity prototyping
- Concept validation
- Socializing design concepts
- Early, generative customer research
- Real-time collaboration
Our ultimate job is to deliver value to our members, whether that value is through reduced costs or that value is through enhanced experience or more meaningful advice. There's a lot of different forms it can take, but that's what we're all here to give.
Meriah Garrett
Chief Design Officer, USAA