We examined emerging competitors and interviewed more than 30 ISS clients across the Americas, Asia, and Europe, from firms managing $100M to $1B+ in assets. We also spoke with ISS employees about internal challenges, and looked at how clients prepared for proxy season, reviewed research, and cast votes.

We mapped client needs and pain points across proxy season, then identified opportunities across the core platform, new digital products, internal processes, and customer support. That map gave ISS a shared view of its priorities and which ideas to explore first.

The clearest priority was PX itself. During proxy season, clients could research and vote on more than 10 meetings a day. Each meeting had multiple proposals, research to review, and votes to coordinate across accounts with different policies, all against overlapping deadlines.

PX supported those sophisticated workflows, but years of technology and design debt had made navigation and everyday tasks unnecessarily complicated. Rebuilding would take significant investment, but some clients were already evaluating competitors. That made the cost of standing still concrete, and improving PX became a clear priority for client retention.

Once ISS committed to the rebuild, timing became the constraint. The redesign had to launch ahead of the next proxy season, with time for training, so there was little room to get it wrong. We brought clients in to test prototypes before committing to detailed design, checking whether the new navigation and information architecture simplified the experience without removing anything clients depended on.

In parallel, we prototyped new product concepts: tools for creating and adjusting voting policies, simulations of how policy changes would have affected past votes, and AI-assisted policy creation and research review. Concrete prototypes helped ISS decide which ideas were worth further investment.

As testing moved into detailed design, I guided how the team turned client feedback into design decisions, set up ongoing client validation, and worked with product and engineering on priorities and tradeoffs.

REF_01 // PROCESS_PRODUCT

Working sessions with the ISS team

I also designed critical parts of the experience myself, including research. Clients reviewed hundreds of research reports during proxy season, so access had to be quick:

• One place for research. Subscribed research and requests for more research lived on separate pages. I combined them, using “Subscribed” and “Not Subscribed” to clarify access and bringing viewing, downloading, and requests together.
• Organized around voting. Each meeting could have five or more reports, each repeating 10+ columns of meeting details. I grouped reports by meeting to remove the repetition. Product favored ordering by publication date, but reports arrived at different times, so I aligned the team on meeting-date order to match how clients vote.
• Simpler without losing flexibility. Report statuses and voting flags became compact indicators beside each report, and extra attributes moved into optional columns. The table is easier to scan, with no functionality removed.

The redesigned platform launches in early 2027. In early demos, clients responded well to the simplified experience and the new product concepts:

“This filter functionality is so much better. Right now it’s such a pain.”

“This is looking good, it looks much cleaner and more intuitive.”

To test leadership’s hypothesis, we combined a competitive audit, a heuristic review of Wells Fargo’s experience, customer research through dscout, and drop-off analysis.

The research showed that length couldn’t explain the drop-off on its own. Customers described not knowing what to do at certain stages or why information was required, and competitors’ flows showed what was missing. Participants were comfortable answering additional security questions in Chase’s flow, for example, because they understood their purpose.

The reframe gave us a clear question to design around: how could we help customers understand what was being asked of them and feel confident taking the next step?

REF_01

Framework development, workshop synthesis.

I translated the findings into four experience principles that gave product, design, and business stakeholders a shared basis for evaluating recommendations.

• Transparent: Explain why information is needed and what customers should expect next.
• Supportive: Anticipate moments of uncertainty and provide guidance that helps customers continue.
• Consistent: Use language, interactions, and feedback that reinforce a predictable experience.
• Easy: Remove unnecessary effort while preserving the explanations customers need.

Every recommendation was tagged with the principle it supported, which gave stakeholders a consistent way to judge it.

These principles informed recommendations such as:

• A progress tracker showing the customer’s current stage and what would follow, making the journey easier to anticipate.
• Clearer copy where customers were unsure why information was required or what to do next.

The progress tracker and clearer copy were two of approximately 25 recommendations I developed with the Wells Fargo team, spanning application, identity verification, funding, activation, and guidance after application. I brought the research perspective on where uncertainty was most pronounced, while the Wells Fargo team assessed feasibility and implementation effort.

Copy improvements emerged as an early priority because they addressed confusion directly, required relatively little effort, and had executive support. Recommendations also extended past the application into funding and becoming customers’ primary bank, such as setting up direct deposit inside the app and tying debit rewards to it.

REF_01 // RECOMMENDATIONS

Application recommendations, prioritized by customer impact and implementation effort.

REF_02 // FUNDING

Excerpt from the roadmap deck: integrating digital direct deposit through a third-party vendor.

REF_03 // INCENTIVES

Excerpt from the roadmap deck: improving debit rewards to promote direct deposit.

Following implementation of several recommendations, including the progress tracker, Wells Fargo measured a 2× increase in conversion and customer satisfaction. The improvement came from helping customers understand each step, not from removing steps.

Before defining the product, I needed to understand how risk managers actually reviewed contracts and where they spent their time. We mapped the existing review process with Enbridge’s risk managers and subject matter experts, and two findings shaped both the experience and the scope of the MVP.

Risk managers needed to respond consistently and accurately across complex policies and business relationships.

Teams worked across different portfolios and contract types, but shared a central need: apply Enbridge’s risk policies consistently and accurately when responding to contracts. Those policies were detailed, and how they applied depended on the relationship. A company’s financial standing and Enbridge’s previous experience with it could influence how much flexibility reviewers allowed on particular terms.

The scope could easily expand beyond contract review.

Stakeholders also wanted assignment, reassignment, and visibility into individual workloads. These needs were valid, but would have expanded the product into workflow management. Given the delivery window and the complexity of contract review itself, I advocated for an MVP focused on helping people review contracts well. That gave us a clear basis for deciding what belonged in the first release.

The process map also showed that risk managers weren’t giving every clause the same attention. They were triaging: finding issues that could block approval, judging how serious they were, and deciding where to look closer. Every contract came down to one question:

“Can I approve this, or do I need to investigate further?”

I designed the contract review experience around that decision. Overall compliance, critical annotations, and coverage requirements are surfaced up front, so reviewers can see where their attention is needed before opening the processed document.

AI could support the review, but reviewers still needed to verify its conclusions. At the risk manager’s request, reviewers must acknowledge critical annotations before proceeding. I explored whether prominent findings alone could do the same job with fewer steps, but we kept the explicit checkpoint, and pilot partners responded well to it in testing.

In the proof of concept, reviewers had to download and read through the processed document to find out what the AI had flagged. The redesigned experience brings those findings into the product, ranked by severity, so reviewers can see in under a minute whether a contract is ready to approve or needs a closer look.

To work for companies beyond Enbridge, ACRE needed more than a strong review experience. I designed for three areas around it:

Configuration. Each company has its own risk policies. Configurable clause rules and permissions let organizations adapt the product to their requirements without custom work.

Onboarding. The model needed historical contracts from each new customer, and gathering them took effort. We reduced how many contracts were needed while keeping enough variety to cover real use cases, and designed onboarding to explain clearly what to submit.

Dashboards. Using findings from past reviews, dashboards show which companies’ contracts have needed more attention and which critical flags tend to come up. That helps teams anticipate review effort, without adding the assignment and workload management we’d kept out of the MVP.

Bringing ACRE to market also meant making sure design would continue after our engagement. I built the design system, helped shape governance with Enbridge, and hired a full-time designer to carry the product forward.

REF_01 // FOUNDATIONS_PRODUCTION

The ACRE design system.

In four months, ACRE went from proof of concept to a market-ready product, cutting contract review from about an hour to under a minute, with three enterprise clients in the launch pilot.