Enigma Case Study
Building Design at Enigma
Scaling design and empowering the team in the process of creating and shipping products.
Challenges met at Enigma
Organizational
How to ship maximum value by implementing an agile process?
Developed a comprehensive design system that boosts consistency, repeatability, and efficiency.
Unified Enigma’s multiple and fragmented product offering into one ecosystem.
Design Process
How did I facilitate the UX design process?
Introduced UX processes application as per research, discovery, testing.
Addressed and resolved confusion between UX and UI design.
Moved team away from present-focused and silo design processes toward future-minded and co-creation strategies.
Shifted the culture at a stakeholder level by bringing the design team into the decision making process.
People
How did I empower the design team?
Implemented and fostered an inclusive recruitment process.
Facilitated career growth in the team by creating one on one weekly meetings.
Designers rose in ranks from associate to leadership positions under my guidance.
Solutions created at Enigma
Human-first
Collaborated with a cross-disciplinary team of engineers and product managers to implement an overarching customer experience strategy for financial services by implementing the Engineering Model with Squads, Tribes, Chapters and Guilds.
Designing at scale
Assured that the team shared a common design framework and set of tools while getting the design scope right and keeping an eye on the future.
Optimize/Create
Developed and implemented a two-fold design operation model based creating future-minded product patterns and goals while simultaneously optimizing existing product patterns and experiences.
Many squads, one engineering tribe
Each squad has complete ownership of a discrete product or solution.
Iteration as the core skill of Big Data.
Distributed experience design.
Team members can and do move between squads.
Design system
“Launch Escher” The design system helped push Enigma from a services company to a product driven company, and allowed for designers to be more deeply embedded into squads.
Team’s philosophy consisted of 3 pillars: (a) humanize the complex, (b) flexibility without prescription and (c) elevate data into intelligence.
How to think about the nature of Enigma design system: (1) a living product, (2) responds to context, (3) enabling for squads.
Product design model
Co-creation system, recognizing that we need to have two distinct but cohesive approaches.
Knowledge, tooling, and resources are shared broadly across squads.
Squads evolve over time based on organizational needs.
Designers are responsible for specific outcomes and trusted to work autonomously.
Overseeing Enigma branding & marketing
Collaborated, with the marketing team and the “Amazing Ann” as Design Lead, to ship all sales, event, press, promotion and marketing materials of Enigma (both digital and printed media).
Launched the “Pursuit Of” recruitment campaign across all disciplines.
Oversaw onboarding of the new Brand Chief Officer, making sure he acquired the necessary knowledge and skills to become an effective organizational member and insider.
Built out in-house design operations and partnerships with external agencies/contractors, including, Martin Seck/ photography, Sadie/sound design, Tiffany Chen/graphic design, Megan Cullen/videography, Andrew Park/motion graphic design and Donia Khalifa/creative production.
Enigma intro deck
Deeper insight into SMB customers faster verification, smarter underwriting & dynamic marketing.
Customer risk assessment & AML strategy
enigma.com / what we heard and learned
What are you ‘in pursuit of’?
Designed recruitment and employee retention event ‘In Pursuit Of’. Recruitment/marketing objects allowed for interactive play as merchandise was selected by attendees to reflect what each individual was ‘in pursuit of’.
Impact at Enigma
Increased the overall hiring.
50%
Improved employee retention successfully by launching multiple cultural builder programs and inclusive company-wide recruitment strategies.
32%
PayPal engagement for the launch of STAT/Stand Together Against Human Trafficking MVP and Q1.
300K
New risk engine offers holistic and flexible customer risk assessment strategy. Bank is well positioned to demonstrate to regulators a newly comprehensive and customizable client risk rating methodology and a vastly improved understanding of overall risk exposure.
BB&T
Human-first approach implemented by being a key stakeholder in launching Enigma’s Engineering agile team organization: Squads, Chapters, Tribes and Guilds.
100%
Increase in application submissions and streamlined applicant experience.
+50%
Beyond design
An essential part of being the team leader is facilitating team building. For us this included group activities such as visits to the park, to PS1 Museum and the Printed Matter book fair and holding community potlucks to celebrate our diverse multi-cultural backgrounds. Thank you to the whole squad (and a special shout-out to the amazing Ann Li for making it all possible)!
Challenges learned from at Enigma
Working with ambiguity, the unknown & complexity.
/ UX & UI
A balancing act/ the agile process requires that work be delegated among the squad while my role as Director requires the cohesion of the overall vision.
/ People Management
In collaboration with:
Craig Danton / VP Product
Clo / lead product designer / claudiamauro.com
Ann / lead brand designer / annlidesign.com
Keith / senior product designer / keithkerr.com
Jiyeon / product designer / jennykang.me
Tiffany / graphic designer / grfkdsgnr.com
Daniel Ocando / product designer
Matt Horan / UX designer