Experience Design & Innovation at Ontario Teachers'

Sixteen months. That is longer than three of my other roles put together, and it is the reason this one is the hardest to write about.

The Experience Design and Innovation team at Ontario Teachers’ sat in an unusual spot. Part internal product team, building the tools investment staff use every day. Part innovation group, testing what the organisation should adopt before anyone had committed to it. Part design practice that any business unit could pull in when they needed research done properly. So the work moved around a lot. I ran research with internal stakeholders, prototyped in Figma, mapped how work actually flowed between teams rather than how the process diagram claimed it did, evaluated tooling nobody had signed off on yet, and named a truly heroic number of Figma files.

There is no single project I can point at and call the story. There are a lot of smaller ones, which is what sixteen months actually looks like from the inside.

Some of it stuck. A component library I worked on is still in use, which is the quiet kind of shipping. A process I mapped got restructured, because the map made visible a manual step everyone had stopped noticing, and that took hours a week off somebody’s plate. Other work went to a team that picked it up after I left, and I will never see how that ended. That is the honest arithmetic of research inside a large organisation.

What I did not expect was how much the scale changed my standard. When the tool you are designing sits between a person and a fund that size, good enough stops being a call you get to make on your own. You check it. Then somebody else checks it. I used to read that kind of rigour as friction, and now I think it is the whole difference between a decision and a guess. A signal that is probably clear is not clear.

I would argue that is the most transferable thing I have, and a pension fund is not where I expected to find it. Sixteen months is a long time to spend learning to slow down before you commit. It is also the only place I could have learned it…