Leading Design for Personal Investing

About my role

The Personal Investing business supports ~80k users, primarily through rollover IRAs that are directly held mutual fund accounts, managed IRA accounts, and Emergency Savings accounts. I lead design across key experiences in this space—including digital rollovers, IRAs, and new product initiatives.

fund selection process

Design Work

  • Withdrawal Landing Page Redesign:
    Built a lightweight landing experience that clarified tax and penalty eligibility based on account type and age—helping users understand implications before initiating a withdrawal. Resulted in a 3.1% drop in daily average count and a 4.4% drop in daily average value of online premature partial IRA withdrawals over the 60-day before-and-after launch period, about $1.39 mil retained AUM.

  • Withdrawal Calculator Coached + Delivered:
    Coached my direct report through a full withdrawal flow revamp. We introduced a calculator that let users enter a total or post-tax amount, visualized federal/state taxes, and improved process clarity—reducing cognitive load and building trust. Resulted in a 2.0% drop in online withdrawal over a 4-month A/B test period compared to the control group, about $1.90 mil retained AUM.

  • “EasyRoll” Rollover Experience:
    Created educational content for the retirement portal that helped users understand rollover options after leaving a job—widening the top of the funnel and reducing reliance on support. Led the redesign of the digital flow, introducing EasyRoll, which auto-matches users’ 401(k) holdings to JH funds—removing a key abandonment point.

  • AI-Powered Experiences for Consultants and Customers:
    Leading the design of generative AI–enabled tools that improve both customer experiences and internal effectiveness—enabling internal teams to deliver consistent, high-quality education during rollover phone conversations, and creating virtual advisory and self-service solutions that address customer pain points and deliver on their most important needs.

  • Designing a New IRA Platform (Brokerage Model):
    Designing the end-to-end experience for a new brokerage-based IRA product—building transaction flows, account structures, and user logic from the ground up to support an entirely different operational model from directly-held accounts.

IRA dashboard

Leadership & Influence

  • Design Demos That Scaled Org-Wide:
    Launched and led a recurring Design Demo series to share strategy and in-progress work. The format expanded beyond my immediate team—drawing in cross-functional leaders by word of mouth.

  • Analytics Subject Matter Expert:
    Took ownership of analytics and tagging infrastructure—working with dev, data, and product partners to ensure our designs were measurable and grounded in real behavior data.

  • AI Hackathon Winner + Team Lead:
    Served as product owner for a cross-functional team that won the Manulife Global Wealth and Asset Management AI hackathon—guiding concept framing, feature definition, and delivery.

  • Cross-Functional Coaching:
    Managed and mentored two designers—shaping how they structured their thinking, told design stories, and grew their confidence in leading work.

  • Trusted Partner to Engineering:
    Built strong relationships with engineering leads—helping shape implementation scope, clarify feasibility early, and advocate for scalable, user-centered solutions throughout delivery. Leveled up the broader team’s approach to design system use and design–engineering handoff quality.

  • Design Thinking Facilitator:
    Designed and led workshops that brought cross-functional teams together to generate ideas, prioritize opportunities, and align on major decisions—creating shared clarity across product, development, and operations.