Summary:

As VP of Product Design at Taylor Digital, I led product and experience strategy for State Farm's Pocket Agent platform, a national mobile application supporting millions of policyholders across insurance and banking services.

The initiative focused on modernizing the customer experience, increasing engagement, and improving retention by transforming fragmented mobile interactions into a cohesive, user-centered platform aligned with evolving customer expectations.

Key Research Impact:

• Used customer behavior insights to prioritize high-frequency mobile tasks, including claims, agent contact, roadside assistance, and insurance card access.
• Research supported the decision to consolidate insurance and banking capabilities into a single mobile platform rather than maintain fragmented task flows.
• Simplified navigation and task access based on real-world customer needs during stressful or time-sensitive moments.
• Research-informed design decisions contributed to strong app-store performance, including Best Insurance Mobile App and Best Bank Mobile App recognition.

Key Decisions:

• Consolidated insurance and banking features into a single mobile platform to reduce fragmentation and improve customer access to high-frequency tasks.
• Prioritized immediate access to critical functions, including claims, agent contact, roadside assistance, and insurance card access.
• Simplified navigation and interaction flows to improve speed and usability for a broad customer base with varying levels of digital familiarity.
• Balanced feature expansion with performance and clarity to maintain a streamlined, high-utility mobile experience.

My Role:

I led a 15-person product design and research organization, overseeing product direction, experience strategy, and delivery performance across State Farm’s mobile platform initiatives.

My role combined executive-level strategy with hands-on leadership, aligning cross-functional teams, influencing senior stakeholders, and ensuring high-quality delivery across a complex, regulated environment.

I established design leadership practices, introduced structured research and analytics frameworks, and guided teams in translating behavioral insights into scalable product improvements.

Key contributions included:

• Defined product and experience strategy across onboarding, engagement, and retention journeys, aligning platform evolution with business and customer goals
• Led a full mobile platform redesign, introducing simplified navigation, streamlined workflows, and improved access to high-frequency features such as claims, payments, and ID cards
• Applied behavioral analytics and experimentation frameworks to inform product decisions and prioritize high-impact improvements
• Established user research programs including interviews, focus groups, observational studies, and surveys to uncover unmet needs and validate solutions
• Developed personas, journey maps, and experience frameworks that aligned teams around customer goals and reduced rework and iteration cycles
• Influenced stakeholder alignment through strategic roadmaps and product vision, securing buy-in for initiatives that reduced projected costs by 28%
• Built team capability through hiring, coaching, and delivery leadership, strengthening execution across product, design, and engineering

Challenge:

State Farm's existing mobile experience had grown organically, resulting in fragmented navigation, inconsistent workflows, and limited alignment with how customers actually managed their policies and financial services.

Key customer journeys, including claims, payments, and policy access, required unnecessary effort, reducing engagement and limiting feature adoption.

At the same time, the organization needed to modernize its digital capabilities while maintaining strict regulatory compliance and aligning across multiple internal stakeholders with competing priorities.

The challenge was to redefine the mobile experience as a strategic platform, simplifying interactions, improving usability, and driving measurable improvements in engagement, retention, and customer satisfaction.

The redesigned Pocket Agent platform transformed fragmented insurance and banking interactions into a single, user-centered mobile experience built around the actions customers needed most.

Strategy & Execution:

The platform redesign followed a data-informed, user-centered approach that connected research, analytics, and delivery.

Customer insights were translated into prioritized product opportunities, which were validated through iterative design, prototyping, and testing.

Cross-functional collaboration ensured alignment between business objectives, technical feasibility, and regulatory requirements, enabling coordinated execution across teams.

Design critique, feedback loops, and continuous iteration were embedded into the delivery process, improving both product quality and team performance.

Experience Transformation:

The redesigned Pocket Agent platform introduced a simplified, intuitive experience focused on the most critical customer needs:

• Streamlined navigation through a centralized menu structure, reducing friction and improving feature discoverability
• Faster access to high-frequency actions such as claims, roadside assistance, and insurance documentation
• Improved content hierarchy and clarity, enabling users to complete tasks more efficiently
• Enhanced mobile workflows designed around real-world usage patterns rather than internal system structures

These improvements created a more cohesive and accessible experience, supporting both new and existing customers across a wide range of use cases.

By prioritizing claims, payments, agent contact, roadside assistance, and insurance card access, the platform made critical tasks faster, clearer, and easier to complete during high-stress moments.

Operating Model & Delivery:

Delivery followed an integrated cross-functional model aligning product, design, engineering, and business stakeholders.

Behavioral analytics, user research, and product performance metrics were incorporated throughout the lifecycle, enabling continuous optimization and informed decision-making.

This approach ensured that product improvements were both strategically aligned and operationally feasible at scale.

Impact & Performance:

The platform transformation delivered measurable improvements across engagement, satisfaction, and business performance:

• Achieved 90% 5-star ratings, reflecting significant improvements in customer experience quality
• Increased active usage by 50% through improved feature adoption and streamlined workflows
• Improved policy renewal performance by 6.9%, directly contributing to revenue retention
• Increased NPS and CSAT by 15%, demonstrating stronger customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Reduced delivery timelines by 2 weeks through improved design processes and team alignment
• Identified and implemented solutions projected to reduce costs by 28% through strategic roadmap planning

Strategic Impact:

This initiative demonstrated how strategic product leadership, behavioral insights, and disciplined execution can transform a complex, regulated platform into a scalable, customer-centered experience that advances both user satisfaction and business performance.