Customer Financials

Digitised NZTE’s annual customer financials collection, replacing a manual, relationship-driven workflow with a scalable digital process. Delivered through phased discovery, MVP and pilot rollout - reducing operational effort, enabling future automation and building stakeholder trust.

Role

Product Design & Research

Timeline

June 2024 - Ongoing

Overview

Business value

The annual collection of customer financials plays a critical role in shaping NZTE’s service strategy and external economic impact reporting.

Historically, this workflow relies on email threads and manual CRM updates, creating operational inefficiencies, inconsistent data quality and significant time burden for Customer Managers. This presented an opportunity to streamline the workflow through a secure, scalable digital solution.

Before state

Project brief

Following multiple stalled attempts to digitise the process, I was brought into the project to help Product reframe the initiative into a phased, achievable delivery plan.
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I led discovery, research and end-to-end design for the first production iteration, while establishing the foundations for future automation and scale.

After state

Outputs

Stage 01 - Clarity & momentum

Moderated generative research with 8 Customer Managers
End-to-end workflow mapping and bottleneck identification
Quantified operational burden, specifically: 10 steps, up to 2 hours per customer across ~1,000 customers
Built stakeholder alignment and unlocked delivery momentum

Visualising the workflow

Stage 02 - Iteration, pilot & rollout

Designed and tested MVP financials collection form
Conducted evaluative testing with proxy users to reduce organisational risk
Delivered controlled production pilot with Customer Managers
Iteratively refined fields, flows and validation logic
Defined a future automation roadmap
Contributed 11 reusable components to the Pallet design system

Phased delivery

Impact

Operational & business outcomes

Reduced workflow from 10 → 7 manual steps saving 500+ hours annually across Focus customers
Created pathway toward ~1,500 hours future automation savings
Freed Customer Manager capacity for higher-value customer engagement
Demonstrated viability of digital tooling for internal service workflows

Product & team outcomes

Partnered closely with Product and Engineering to shape delivery strategy
Strengthened evidence-led decision making across stakeholders
Built organisational confidence for further operational digitisation
Expanded Pallet design system with scalable, reusable components

Reflections

This work reinforced two key takeaways about designing within complex operational systems.

Strategic impact begins with clarity

Clear problem framing is the foundation for successful delivery and sustained impact.

Sustainable change requires alignment

Coordinated people, process and data enable lasting change.