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Kristine Spengler Resume & Portfolio

Human Centered Design Leader

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Summary

Product leader with a passion for delighting customers and empowering others to use design thinking & lean innovation to solve customer problems & fulfill unmet needs. Extensive experience using rapid experimentation to test new ideas and develop scalable business models as well as in teaching others to run hypothesis-driven experiments using principles rooted in the scientific method. Expertise leading and sustaining highly engaged cross-functional teams and in managing organizational change efforts. Trained innovation coach with 20+ years of experience leading teams that build human-centered, omnichannel, end-to-end user experiences


Key Skills

  • Digital product management

  • Service design

  • Innovation coaching

  • Design strategy

  • Experience design

  • Human centered design

  • Design thinking

  • User research & synthesis

  • Rapid experimentation

  • Group workshop facilitation

  • Organizational change management

  • Agile workflow implementation & management

  • Building impactful partnerships & influencing without authority

  • Influencing & managing cross-functional teams

  • Managing & collaborating with distributed teams


Professional Experience

 

USAA

Service Design Lead
November, 2021 - Current

 

American Family Insurance

Design Strategist
January, 2020 - October, 2021

Innovation Catalyst
September, 2017 - December, 2019

SERVICE DESIGN LEAD

Support USAA Bank product and design teams in their effort to understand the breadth and depth of their current state digital product experiences and reimagine those experience, using member data, to solve problems and deliver delight. Recent accomplishments:

  • Led an educational session for Agile Coaches to become practitioners of Human-Centered Design, enabling them to guide their teams in techniques to make faster, smarter, member-focused product decisions.

  • Guided the creation of an executive VP-level working session to align and decide on foundational elements for a USAA Rewards program.

  • Designed & facilitate a working session for the checking and deposits bank product teams resulting in the creation of a 3-year strategic, product roadmap designed to increase customer acquisition and product revenue. The working session was followed by generative research and interactive member working sessions in which product teams worked with potential members to ideate on new banking products and features that deliver tangible member value.

  • Performed research and synthesized data that provided the USAA Chief Design Office with an understanding of the strategic impact the centralized design organization has had with line of business partners. The results of the research, have enabled executive leaders to determine strategic priorities related to talent acquisition, talent development as well as value delivery related to digital product management.

  • Collaborated to create a repeatable, twice-a-year team health assessment process designed to allow support for individual contributors and escalate unhealthy team circumstances to executive leadership. The program is in it’s second full year, has onboarded 4 new facilitators (total of 8), performed 21 team health checks, delivered 3 summarized team health reports to executive leadership and has been scaled to evaluate leadership team health across the Chief Design Office.

 

DESIGN STRATEGIST

Used design process and mindset to find holistic solutions to ambiguous and complex, cross-enterprise problems​​​​​​. Collaborate with partners and stakeholders to co-create customer-driven solutions that are as simple as they are effective. Projects completed this year include:

  • Auto COE, Know Your Drive Experience Design

    • Project Objective: Discover opportunities for improvement to the Know Your Drive experience outside of the app for agents, policy holders, and customer service reps

    • Project Outcomes: Identified top 2 root causes impacting the end-to-end experience for agents, customers, and service reps.

    • My Role: Conducted quantitative & qualitative research; performed content inventory and analysis.

  • Auto COE, Innovation Pipeline Strategy & Design

    • Project Objective: Design strategy & process for moving concepts from idea stage to scaling multiple markets

    • Project Outcomes: Created a vision for a potential pipeline and am currently working with leadership to develop a roll-out strategy

    • My Role: Combined concepts from Lean Start-up, design thinking, agile, and Strategyzer (creators of the Business Model Canvas) with learnings from qualitative research to create an Auto COE specific innovation process

  • Independent Agent Channel Landscape Research

    • Project Objective: Develop a body of knowledge & internal expertise about independent agency norms and needs on a national scale.

    • Project Outcomes: Channel insights and design principles that are exclusive to the American Family Insurance Enterprise. This work represents a competitive advantage at a time of accelerated change.

    • My Role: Conducted qualitative research & collaborated with research team to identify insights & opportunities, design principles.

  • Unified Independent Agent Digital Experience - Design Sprint

    • Project Objective: Our partner came to us with three primary objectives:

      • Align stakeholders & leaders on top problems within the current agent experience.

      • Engage stakeholders in new way of working, to increase awareness of and confidence in a new iterative approach to product development.

      • Complete the first two requests within 4 weeks of initial request.

    • Project Outcomes: A 5-day remote, design- sprint based in part on the original Google Design Sprint that took participants from shared understanding of current state, to co-creation of a vision for future state, to identification of top agent problems, and finished with designing prototypes and gathering agent feedback. Our NPS score, derived from an anonymous participant survey, was 71, or “world class” according to Bain, the creator of the NPS index measurement.

    • My Role: Lead point of contact for all partner communication. Designed agenda & facilitated sessions. Created Mural boards, designed & delivered a Design Thinking primer for participants, created summary/ recommended next steps for business partners.

  • MSA Post Sales Activities - Research & 3-5 Year Strategy Report

    • Project Objective: Understand, map and record "one source of truth" of current state service processes to inform key decisions made by digital product & customer service teams.

    • Project Outcomes: Identified common processes, created service blueprints and journey maps, determined patterns, and created recommendations for a new 3-5 year growth strategy.

    • My Role: Led research team, conducted analysis, created 3-5 year strategy report.

INNOVATION CATALYST

Coached cross-functional, dedicated teams participating in a 90-day corporate sponsored, innovation accelerator to use a hybrid approach that combined the best principles from Design Thinking, Agile, & Lean Start-up to search for & create delightful, emotionally engaging solutions to customer problems. Objective of the 90-day cohort accelerator was to drive business outcomes while influencing participants through practice and safe experimentation to adopt repeatable, continuous innovation-discovery behaviors. Key results from these efforts include:

  • Identifying a primary blocker preventing the company from realizing a multi-million dollar potential savings from customer enrollment in paperless communication.

    • Team presented evidence of the blockers to senior leadership which resulted in emergency budget & resource prioritization approval that led to creating a seamless, online user experience that paved the way for paperless adoption.

  • Creating a simplified process to support more effective development conversations between managers and employees resulting in more accurate enterprise talent identification & mobility processes.

    • Team validated a customer and problem within weeks, validated a solution for a single market (a Claims business unit) within a month and then scaled to multiple internal “markets” based on world-of-mouth marketing.

  • Discovering the differentiating value of a promising but insufficiently-defined and generously-funded internal start-up.

    • Team identified & validated an important internal customer problem that could be solved with the new channel of delivery in a way that could not easily be copied or repeated.

    • Validation of the customer problem lengthened the internal-startup runway allowing for additional value to be identified and delivered.

View American Family Insurance slideshow

 

Infusionsoft

Service Designer
October, 2015 - October, 2016

Created services that supported the seamless on-boarding of new or consistently inactive customers as well as helped build a culture of design.  Approached this objective by focusing on 2 key functions:

  1. Encouraging rapid experimentation through example and education

  2. Identifying existing services with the potential for expansion


DETAILS:

Design thinking/rapid experimentation workshops

Summary: Created workshops designed to help product leaders understand the basics of design thinking & how to incorporate it into their existing workflows as well as how to run experiments effectively.

About the solution:

  • Problem: the entire design team was tasked by the VP of Product to build a design thinking culture specifically within the larger Product team.
  • Hypothesis: If we teach design thinking and experimentation principles to the design team, the design team will then be able to integrate the principles into their cross-functional teams.
  • Assumptions: Design team can learn & embrace design thinking and experimentation; design team can integrate methodology into their cross functional teams
  • Assumptions proven true: Design team can learn design thinking. We measured use of design thiking terminology and use of experimentation tools as well as counted number of experiments completed.
  • Assumptions not proven true: Designers will integrate design thinking principles into their cross functional teams.
  • Conclusion: While designers completely embraced design thinking as a workflow technique, they lacked the ability to influence their teams to change the team workflow.

Next steps & recommendations: Design thinking culture needed to be developed through a multi-faceted, cross-functional approach.

Creating custom action plans for new customers

Summary: Used service design tools and methodology to create an in-person experience that provided nearly 300 customers the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Infusionsoft product experts. Each customer walked away with a custom marketing action plan with step by step instructions on how to implement the plan in the tool.

About the solution:

  • Problem: Subscription cancellations were rising at an alarming rate. Early research indicated that 50% of new customers that received on-boarding training did not know what to do next to get the most of their subscription investment.
  • Hypothesis: If we create a custom action plan for Icon attendees with step by step instructions of what needed to be done next in their application to get the best use of the tool then more customers would be able to take the in-tool next-steps confidently and accurately and fewer customers would cancel their subscription.
  • Assumptions: We could create custom action plans; Custom action plans would lead to more customer activity in the application; Greater activity in the application would lead to fewer cancellations.
  • Results: When wifi connectivity prevented the use of the custom app we built to create the action plans, consultants had to manually create action plans by hand. Because most of the action plans were created manually we lost the ability to track our original measures of success.

Next steps & recommendations: Debriefed with team on insights. Recreated the experiment by meeting with customers remotely, post conference.

Infusionsoft University-Online

Summary: Launched an online version of the existing & highly rated Infusionsoft University.

About the solution:

  • Problem: more than half of all new customers answered "No" to the statement "I know what to do next in Infusionsoft".
  • Hypothesis: if we make training more easily accessible, more people will attend basic training and be able to understand the next-steps to take in the software.
  • Assumptions: customers will sign up for online training; customers will pay full price for online training; customers will learn through the online channel; basic training leads to an understanding of what to do next in the software
  • Assumptions proven: Customers signed up & paid full price to attend online training. Most classes had waiting lists. Customers were able to learn in an online, one-to-many format as determined by the results of quiz questions asked throughout the training.
  • Assumptions not proven: Basic training leads to understanding what to do next in the software.

Next steps & recommendations: Online training can be an effective means to help customers understand what to do next if the content is customized for that objective.

View Infusionsoft slide show

 

Intuit

Product Manager
October 2011 – November, 2015

Digital product manager on three unique efforts:

  1. Enterprise collaboration & productivity - the tools the global workforce used to communicate and collaborate were extensive and mission critical

  2. myIntuit - an internally developed Salesforce app designed to help people leaders take care of the administrative and managerial aspects of their role in one place on one platform

  3. Tier 0 HR Support - an HR Services project designed to be the first stop for employees whenever they had HR related questions.

In addition to my role as a product manager I was an innovation catalyst, which is a group of hand selected, highly trained employees responsible for spreading and supporting a design thinking culture.


DETAILS:


Enterprise Collaboration and Productivity

Role: Product Manager

  • Transitioned the Unified Communications (UC) development team from the waterfall deployment of Jabber to agile Scrum development of the UC suite of applications and tools. Deployed Jabber to 8,000+ employees and partners. Interviewed customers & created surveys to monitor feedback on upcoming enterprise rollouts.
  • Analyzed customer data and made recommendations for full-feature request criteria.
  • Balanced user requirements with technical capabilities to create long-term product roadmap.

View Enterprise Collaboration slide show


myIntuit

Role: Product Manager

  • Envisioned and implemented a cloud-based, responsive HR portal that provides access to the key information, tools, and tasks required for people leaders to successfully manage their teams. Acted as Product Owner for the Scrum team.
  • Conducted 25+ customer interviews, remote user tests & surveys.
  • Created user personas & used interview data to design a vision for solving targeted customer problems.
  • Created the case for a manager control panel/portal resulting in leadership approval and resources to build the prototype. Developed roadmap, backlog of user stories, functioning wireframes, and style guides.
  • Resulted in a responsive site built on Force.com using service delivered apps and integrated with a Sharepoint 2010 corporate intranet that saved users 1+ hours/week.

View myIntuit slideshow


Tier 0 HR Support

Role: Product Manager

  • Supported product & service teams in their efforts to perform continuous improvement through rapid experiments on intranet experiences.
  • Influenced technology team to update design templates. Successful efforts led to an HR departmental adoption of using Lean Start-In techniques to drive process and service improvements.
  • Created a new method of driving customers to support/care articles resulting in a 50% increase in content consumption and a 10% decrease in new customer cases.

View Tier 0 HR Services slide shows

  • HR Connect rebuild
  • HR Connect On-the-Go experiment
  • Talent Acquisition rebuild
  • We Care and Give Back rebuild
  • Contingent Workforce rebuild
  • Hiring & Onboarding rebuild


Innovation Catalyst

Role: Catalyst for change, Consultant, Workshop Leader

Promoted design thinking across the organization; facilit ated and coached eight Lean Start-In events, facilitated countless D4D exercises & events, coached teams on integrating D4D into their operating mechanisms.

Consulted with HR, finance, and product development leaders on best practices for implementing design thinking, continuous improvement, and Intuit’s branded approach to these goals called Design for Delight (D4D).

One of only eight individuals selected for the Awesome Product Leadership research team.

  • Efforts culminated in an enterprise wide roll-out of a coaching program focused on using teachable moments to help directors and above understand how to be servant-leaders in the age of innovation which resulted in a +9 net promoter score.

View Innovation Catalyst slide shows

  • Innovation Catalyst Offsite
  • Awesome Product Leadership, Lean Start-In Event
  • Using D4D to create annual goals & objectives
  • Leading Lean Start-Up at Cal Poly
  • Coaching a team for director level Lean Start-In
  • Teaching Quickbooks customers Design-4-Delight
 

Anchor Wave

Program Manager
March, 2010 – October, 2011

Managed a six-person cross-functional team; prioritized workload & cleared roadblocks. Collaborated with team members to create personal development plans and performed monthly check-ins to ensure progress toward goals. Acted as the single point of contact for all external client interactions. Set expectations with customers & team for timing of deliverables. Created inspiration boards and set the direction for site design.

  • Ensured production tasks were completed on time while meeting or exceeding expectations.

  • Managed a portfolio of 25-30 projects at various stages of the product development process.

  • Launched 35 custom Wordpress websites and applications in 12-months.

View Anchor Wave slide shows:

  • Casino del Sol

  • Mexico's Copper Canyon

  • Castle & Cooke

 

Target

Program Manager & Learning Experience Designer

July, 2004 - February, 2009

Program Manager - HR Interaction Design, October, 2006 – March, 2009

Managed programs for an interactive design and development team comprised of 10 designers and developers based in Bangalore, India. Developed processes & operating mechanisms to manage and prioritize the team’s workload.

  • First year efforts resulted in a company cost savings of over $1 million.

  • Gained executive committee approval to expand the team by 16 team members.

Learning Experience Designer - Organizational Effectiveness, July, 2004 – October, 2006

Designed a training program for the enterprise deployment of the Ariba Procurement suite. Program combined 50 self-paced simulation lessons; instructor led training, real-time performance-support and knowledge management documentation, as well as open labs and guided workshops.

  • Received a Corporate Collaboration Award for developing a simplified and unified training program for disparate teams across the organization that came in $50,000 under budget.

View Target slide show

 

RZ Solutions

Business Analyst & Technical Trainer
January, 2001 – July, 2004

As a certified Cognos and Business Objects Instructor and consultant, developed and facilitated custom curriculum. Gathered and documented business requirements used in the development of data warehouse and reporting systems.

  • Traveled extensively throughout the US, Canada, and Latin America for companies such as 3M, Medtronic, Carlson Wagonlit, General Mills, Schneider National, and PepsiCo.

View RZ Solutions slide show


Education

University of Minnesota  - Information Management Systems, Post-Graduate Certification

University of Wisconsin-Madison  - B.S. Education

 

Interests & Accomplishments

Child & Family Resources, Member, Board of Directors, 2012-2016 (view coaching the staff slide show)

Creative Startups, Guest Faculty

Google Start-up Weekend: Tucson, Winner of 2013 Lean Start-up competition (view Start-up Weekend slide show)

Start-up Tucson, Volunteer, 2013- present

Global Service Design Network, Member since 2017


Technical Acumen

Summary:

  • Luma Institute Certified HCD Practitioner & Facilitator

  • Intuit trained Innovation Catalyst & design thinking facilitator

  • Scrum Project Management, ICAgile Professional Certification, 89-1835-e6b66094-ebf9-4ae2-8bc7-403630027af8

  • Service Design Immersive, Cooper, Credential: 13822987

  • Proficient in most prototyping, user research, content management, & enterprise collaboration tools including:

    • Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop/Illustrator/XD/Acrobat)

    • Sharepoint 2010/2013

    • Confluence

    • UserZoom.com

    • Mural


DETAILS

Professional Certifications

  • Scrum Project Management, ICAgile Professional Certification
  • Innovation Catalyst/Design Thinking Facilitation, Intuit Certified, Level 3
  • Service Design Immersive, Cooper

Prototyping

  • Figma
  • Adobe Creative Cloud/Suite (Photoshop/ Illustrator/XD)
  • CSS/HTML

Usability Research

  • UserZoom

Remote Design Facilitation

  • Mural
  • Miro
  • FigJam
  • Zoom White Board

Analytics

  • Adobe Analytics (SiteCatalyst)
  • Google Analytics

Foundational

  • MS Office Suite
  • Office 365
  • Google apps

Content Management & Publishing Platforms

  • Sharepoint 2010, 2013
  • Wordpress
  • Squarespace
  • Shopify

Web Marketing & Rapid Experimentation

  • Keap
  • Unbounce
  • Survey Monkey
  • Mailchimp

Enterprise Collaboration

  • Slack
  • MS Teams
  • Wiki
  • Confluence

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kristine@kspengler.com
520.400.2734