Partner Integration Toolkit
The Integration Toolkit is a brand new 0-to-1 enterprise product built from scratch for Citi's Open Banking team, aimed at accelerating the onboarding process for Citi's partners and streamlining the planning and testing phases for both Citi's internal relationship managers and the partner representatives.
My role
Lead UX designer
Duration
10 months
Time
2019-2020
Platform
Web browser
Overview
We envision the Partner Dashboard as a new tool for the Citi Open Banking team to streamline and scale our partnership integrations. This would function as a single source of truth for both Citi and external partners to track tasks and measure the health of our APIs. Moving forward this platform has the potential to support other regional teams, like APAC and EMEA, as well as form the foundational elements for Banking as a Service (BaaS) at Citi.
Project goal is to reduced migration timelines to 2 months (kick-off - customer go-live), consolidating our Metrics Frameworks across the Open Banking Program. Aggregate Site Catalyst & Splunk data into internal & external dashboard views.
Longer-term perspective, position Partner Migration tool for BaaS initiatives & apply mechanisms for commercialization to other line of business.
Problems
How might we
Create a standardized capability for faster partnership integration at scale?
Approach
Challenge
The main challenge of this project was the unclear and overwhelming requirements. I first received a 100+ page playbook from our partner, with only two pages highlighted for guidance, along with an Excel sheet from the product team containing 20+ tabs of ideas and potential features.
Instead of waiting for a clear design brief, I took the initiative to collaborate with the product team and the Technical Program Manager (TPM). We spent several afternoons in whiteboard sessions to define the core goals and shape the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This hands-on approach helped us make progress and move the project forward despite the initial complexity.
Process
Project goal is to reduced migration timelines to 2 months (kick-off - customer go-live), consolidating our Metrics Frameworks across the Open Banking Program. Aggregate Site Catalyst & Splunk data into internal & external dashboard views.
Longer-term perspective, position Partner Migration tool for BaaS initiatives & apply mechanisms for commercialization to other line of business.
Deliverables
After working closely with Product Team to determine and prioritize features for MVP, and worked with TPM to define each sprint delivery planning, below are the final MVP flow and some key pages I have delivered.
Takeaways
During the design and iteration process, I learned to prioritize the features that mattered most to our target users while balancing multiple projects (such as Dev Hub and toolkit features). A key part of my role was to maintain open communication with the Product Owner and developers, ensuring expectations were aligned and reducing the risk of rework.
As the lead UX designer, I collaborated with three UI designers and two copywriters to build the product experience. Initially, keeping the design team aligned was challenging due to frequent file updates and long email threads, which led to decision-making confusion. To resolve this, I took the initiative to prototype the wireframes in InVision, onboarded the team to use it, and ensured everyone had access to the latest files. This significantly improved communication, streamlined updates, and helped us track all design decisions efficiently across screens.