I developed a service blueprint with our stakeholders and verified it with the employees who respond to regulator requests. We discovered that they took eight manual steps to assemble documents the regulator requested. They accessed several systems and depended on other employees to fill in the gaps. This process made it difficult to gage if they'd gathered a complete and accurate loan history.

The product designer took on the painstaking task of documenting the systems that an Ops Analyst accessed to compile a loan credit file. She discovered that the analyst got data out of eight systems, everything from a mainframe to a SharePoint site. Her work helped executives gain empathy for the employees and gave them a clear understanding of why it takes so long to assemble a complete set of documents.

I led the creation of personas for the key players in the process. I knew it was crucial to build out a persona for the regulator because they were the customers. Fortunately, a team member was a former regulator. He helped us get into that headspace. We determined that a regulator's ultimate goal is to protect the public from flawed banking practices. They needed to ensure that our practices were sound and transparent, helping the customer and the bank.

Owen assembled the loan files. We put a name to the face and articulated his challenges and goals. Again, being able to share Owen's plight with executives helped build empathy and the desire to help.