How We Kept CX at the Heart of Organizational Change

Key learnings growing from 1 to 250+ teams 

Introduction

At a large financial institution, I was part of a leadership team tasked with modernizing a lagging digital customer experience (CX). In just the first two years of our six-year journey, we increased team output by 4x, raised employee satisfaction by 20%, and unlocked $150 million in measurable business value. More importantly, customers opened accounts faster and completed complex transactions in half the time—without the need for paperwork or phone calls. The experience shifted from reacting to customer needs and executing transactions to proactively guiding customers toward better financial outcomes. As a result, they felt more in control, supported by clearer guidance and tailored investment options.

To prove a path forward, we launched a pilot team that combined product, UX, data analytics, and engineering—an integrated model new to the organization. This multidisciplinary approach led to better decisions, faster delivery, and more cohesive customer and employee experiences. The pilot tackled a notoriously painful task: transferring money from an outside institution. By empowering the team and fostering cross-functional collaboration, we launched new features 3x faster, increased completion rates by 20%, and removed major customer friction. Customers could now complete transactions digitally, in half the time, with full transparency and confidence.

With results like that, leaders naturally asked, “How do we scale this?” But as we explored how to grow from one team to hundreds, a deeper question emerged: how do we maintain a customer-centered culture as we scale?

Expanding to 250+ teams introduced new complexity. Our biggest challenge became strategic cohesion—maintaining alignment, preserving our customer-first mindset, and embedding efficient, modern ways of working. The goal wasn’t just scale—it was scaling without losing the spirit, clarity, and collaboration that made the pilot a success.

To navigate this, we focused on three key leadership tenets:

Principles

Anchor to a Common Purpose

To answer the question of how do we maintain a customer-centered culture?, we began by unpacking our company’s purpose and value proposition: to give every investor the best chance for investment success. This became the beginning of creating a shared understanding & connective tissue across our growing network of teams—anchoring decision-making and aligning efforts around a unified vision. To bring this principle to life across disciplines, we focused on the following tactics:

• Establishing a Common Language – We introduced a shared problem-framing method rooted in customer pain points and what they valued most. Inspired by the “jobs to be done” mindset, this approach required every discipline—business, product, design, engineering, marketing, analytics, and research—to empathize with the customer and take accountability for closing experience gaps. It created alignment across teams and kept strategies focused on delivering real customer value.
• Instilling CX Principles – All teams were required to align to a set of customer experience principles and report back to stakeholders on how their portion of the experience delivered against them. These principles served as non-negotiable guideposts for decision-making:
  • Financial Wellness: Helping clients make informed financial decisions with confidence.
  • Ease: Reducing friction in digital experiences to enhance usability and accessibility.
  • Scalable: Ensuring solutions remained adaptable and sustainable as the organization evolved.

• Walking in the Customer’s Shoes – A phrase we often returned to was, “You can’t solve what you can’t see.” To turn that mindset into action, teams across all disciplines participated in walkthroughs and demos—watching customer reactions and listening to interviews. This direct exposure grounded decision-making in real experiences and reinforced the need for mobile-first design and cross-channel consistency.

People

Building Strong, Empowered Teams

Sustaining impact at scale required more than just organizational structure—it demanded a culture grounded in trust, shared clarity, and empowered execution. Rather than rely on top-down mandates, we focused on building healthy, high-performing teams that could collaborate across disciplines and adapt to evolving needs. The following approaches were critical:

• Reimagining Talent Profiles – We reshaped roles to reflect baseline competencies in four key areas: user experience, business acumen, technical aptitude, and data literacy. This helped us build more cross-functional teams and informed targeted training programs to close skill gaps and grow future leaders.
• Establishing the Player-Coach Model– We introduced a new leadership model that blended strategic oversight with hands-on execution. By embedding player-coach roles, we enabled leaders to stay close to the work while guiding teams, which not only strengthened collaboration but also gave employees a path to grow leadership skills without stepping away from their craft.
• Operationalizing Collaboration – As the organization scaled, we leaned into facilitation methods rooted in design thinking to define how disciplines worked together at scale. Outputs like client-problem roadmaps and future-state experience demos—often showcased by senior leaders—clarified roles, strengthened alignment, and kept teams anchored in real customer needs.

Practices

Leveraging modern methodologies to enable our best work

To sustain transformation at scale, we needed more than strong teams—we needed shared practices that could scale with us, reflect modern standards, and foster deep cross-functional collaboration. As we grew, maintaining connection across 250+ teams depended on shared rituals, tools, and frameworks that reinforced our customer-centered vision. We reimagined our workflows to be adaptable and grounded in industry best practices. While not exhaustive, the following practices reflect key enablers of progress:

• CX Vision Alignment – A new, required deliverable for every team, the CX vision defined a desired future state through the eyes of the customer. This vision aligned all stakeholders—from executives to execution teams—around a clear picture of what “great” looks like. Echoing our earlier mindset, making the ideal experience visible was essential—because you can’t solve what you can’t see.
• Design Sprints – These time-boxed, two-week efforts gave cross-functional teams a focused way to quickly test and refine experiences.
• CX Strategy Maps – These visuals linked business goals to customer needs, showing how our experience had to evolve to meet both. They translated executive intent into clear guidance for teams, keeping daily decisions aligned with long-term strategy and customer value.
• Enterprise Design System – A library of reusable UX/UI components designed & built to ensure consistency, scalability, and accessibility across platforms. The design system helped reduce technical redundancy and enabled teams to deliver cohesive experiences more efficiently. 

Conclusion

Scaling Without Losing Sight of What Matters

Transformation at scale isn’t just about changing systems—it’s about protecting the soul of an organization as it grows. For us, that meant ensuring our company’s core promise—to give every investor the best chance for investment success—resonated in every interaction.

Our leadership tenets—principles, people, and practices—became more than strategy. They became culture carriers, embedding customer-centeredness into the fabric of how we worked, led, and made decisions.

They enabled us to scale from one team to 250+ without losing the clarity, empathy, and shared purpose that made the pilot a success.

When organizations align on purpose, build with empathy, and lead with intention, growth doesn’t dilute impact—it deepens it.