Case study

Sun Life UX Practice Evolution

How we turned around a struggling design practice by focusing on people, culture, and community.

MY ROLE:

AVP, UX Design

ORGANIZATION:

Sun Life Financial

DATE:

June 2021 - June 2023

TEAM MEMBERS:

  • Craig Moore
  • Kim Summers
  • Joanne Lister
  • Maria Trautmann
  • Karri Ojanen
  • Jessica Matson
  • Samantha Walsh

The Challenge

It wasn’t always sunshine…

When I took over leading the UX organization at Sun Life, I knew we had our work cut out for us.

Sun Life had embarked on a large-scale digital transformation, with design expected to play a key role in helping re-orient the broader organization around customer experience and outcomes. We were being asked to double the size of the team to support this new direction. Great news, right?

Not so fast.

The UX team had grown steadily since being established in 2012, and had attracted some great talent. However, under-investment in the foundational practice had created a perfect storm of issues that needed to be addressed before we could think about scaling further.

To quickly summarize where we were:

  • The UX team had the lowest engagement scores across our entire digital organization.

  • Lack of career paths for XD professionals led to over-levelling and inconsistent talent evaluation.

  • No support for junior designers meant we had to hire established talent…which we couldn’t afford.

  • High reliance on contract resources (40% of the team was contract).

  • Gaps at the functional leadership level were fueling attrition (as high as 60% YoY on some teams).

So how could we retain the people we had, attract top talent in a challenging job market, and build a better design culture all at the same time?

The Case Study

Evolving the UX Practice at Sun Life

The Results

Investing in people and practice pays off

By focusing on building a strong design practice, we were able to boost internal engagement scores by +20 to 30 points across multiple dimensions.

In just two years we were able to go from the least engaged group within the digital Product team to having the highest engagement scores in our entire organization:

+13

point increase in overall team engagement scores.

+32

point increase in agreement with statement: “There are opportunities to grow my career at Sun Life.”

98%

talent retention rate in FY2023.

+20%

increase in overall experience quality (measured via SUM score).

Most importantly, we completely changed the designer experience at Sun Life. Whereas previously new designers struggled due to lack of leadership and process, we had created an environment where both new and experienced XD professionals could thrive.

But don’t take it from me…