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Kamusta – I'm Randee Rose.

Product designer who makes sense of ambiguity and brings the right people together to build products that earn real trust from the people who use them, and real growth for the businesses behind them.

Currently @ TELUS Digital, formerly WillowTree  📍  Based in Richmond, Virginia

Randee Rose
Fortrea PenFed Credit Union Synchrony Zumba Domino's Best Western Guardian TELUS Digital Sun Outdoors Lidl Sony Virgin Voyages Fortrea PenFed Credit Union Synchrony Zumba Domino's Best Western Guardian TELUS Digital Sun Outdoors Lidl Sony Virgin Voyages

Experience

I'm a Product Designer at TELUS Digital (formerly WillowTree), where I'm brought in on the engagements with the most ambiguity: new clients with no shared vision yet, fragmented input from multiple stakeholders, or a 0-to-1 product that has to earn a client's trust before it earns their next round of investment.

I work just as well on fast-timeline engagements as I do staffed long term on a single account, and I can carry a project the whole way through: from blue-sky and ambiguous to fully detailed, partnering closely with developers and product along the way, documenting thoroughly, and actually delivering the features that come out of it.

My work spans healthcare and clinical research, financial services, fitness, food service, hospitality, insurance, and telecom, and regularly puts me on some of the company's largest and most recognizable accounts, including Fortune 500 brands like Synchrony and Domino's. Being trusted to lead design on engagements at that scale, and to be the person new clients meet first, is its own kind of proof that the work and the relationships hold up.

Before TELUS Digital, I interned at The Martin Agency and studied creative and strategic advertising at Virginia Commonwealth University. I felt like those skills could transfer directly into product design, and I think that's part of why the field clicked: it satisfies both sides of my brain, the logical, problem-solving side and the creative, visual side.

Hard skills
Product strategy Strategic thinking UX/UI design Design systems Prototyping Conversational/AI product design Research facilitation & synthesis Proactive process design Information architecture Design critique & mentorship
Soft skills
Fast, self-directed learner Executive & client communication Cross-functional leadership & collaboration Consensus building "Thinking in bets," per my manager Navigating ambiguity Process & documentation advocacy Adaptability under pressure

How I show up in the work

Trust is earned

Every engagement I've been on has grown rather than shrunk: extended scope, renewed contracts, clients who ask for me by name. That track record comes from earning trust first, instead of chasing the metric.

Structure is a deliverable

A design system, a critique cadence, a handoff process. I build the scaffolding a team didn't know it needed yet, then leave it in a state where it outlasts me.

Align the room before the redesign

The hardest part of ambiguous work is rarely the screens, it's getting a room of conflicting stakeholders to agree on what's true. I'd rather spend a week on that than a month redesigning around disagreement.

Lead like you already are one

My manager's feedback to me over the years has had less to do with skill and more with owning the influence I already have, sharing what's working with other designers instead of waiting for a title to do it.

Kind Words

Bank Marketing Site

"The smoothest it has ever been on this team, that workshop she did was absolutely incredible. She shined. I just can’t imagine how we can continue without you."

AVP / Product Manager, Synchrony
Bank Marketing Site

"We’ve loved having Randee with us, she is so, so awesome... Randee shined in that challenge. We adored working with her on that."

VP of Consumer Bank Digital Strategy, Synchrony
Bank Marketing Site

"She has even helped with analytics, pulling it into our decision making, and that has been huge in helping us move forward. We absolutely love that she runs her ideas through other designers to help bring us the best."

Product Team, Synchrony
Bank Marketing Site

"This is an exemplar of world-class client partnership: being able to suss out their business objectives and goals, and provide an effective design strategy to move them forward. The fact that the client continually wants her to work with them and carry forward their vision is indicative of how much they trust Randee."

Senior Product Researcher, TELUS Digital
Bank Marketing Site

"Randee has been a solo embedded designer with the Synchrony bank team. Her leadership and process-focused approach has made a tremendous foundation in bringing real, lasting principles to their design and development practice."

Research Director, TELUS Digital
Bank Marketing Site

"Randee demonstrated exceptional leadership for Synchrony Bank by proposing and implementing a design system, then coaching the developers on how to use it and build reusable components. A developer noted a feature took only 50 lines of code with the design system, where a similar effort before would have required 500, a tenfold improvement in quality and time."

Director, Delivery, TELUS Digital
Bank Marketing Site

"I want to shout you out for the stellar work, partnership, and client management you’ve done on the Synchrony Bank design support project. I appreciate the partnership, you rock!"

Senior Product Designer, TELUS Digital

"I was blown away with how quickly Randee built a concept prototype in Figma Make with such limited time and context. This approach brought the client’s idea to life in a way that static designs couldn’t."

Delivery Lead, TELUS Digital

"Thank you so much for the thought that went into this. I think you’re hitting all of the right areas. Directionally, I’m good with all of your suggestions."

Chief Technology Officer, Best Western Hotels

"I really appreciate Randee’s ability to be autonomous and diligent about her work, she created clear options for different paths forward, while having a POV that was on-brand, warm, and simple."

Delivery Lead, TELUS Digital
Billing

"As the only 100% allocated member of the team, Randee is the powerhouse keeping this project rolling: grabbing ideas and strategic input from the rest of us and turning it into great concepts and decks at an impressive speed, largely without support, and doing it quickly and well."

Staff Content Designer, TELUS Digital
Billing

"Randee came in and added this layer of connecting the strategic vision from the digital pieces, and did a great job of connecting it back to the paper bill."

Director of Design, TELUS Digital
Billing

"This has been a really fun session, by the way. I do these things with designers a lot, and it’s sometimes hard to feel like we were really productive. This feels incredibly productive, we got a lot of clarity. So first, just thank you."

Principal, Strategy Consulting, TELUS Digital

"You’ve done work outside the scope of design which really sheds a light on how we can improve our process. I’ve really enjoyed having you, and I think you’ve done a tremendous job."

Lead Product Designer, Domino's

"I feel like in the short time that you’ve been here, you’ve impacted our process so much, and you’ve just been so thorough with everything. I’ve referred to your documentation a few times, like you’re just very good at thinking through everything and being detailed."

Product Designer, Domino's

"Randee Rose had her first client on-site experience last week with Virgin Voyages. Throughout our time with the client, I was incredibly impressed by her coolness under pressure, curiosity, and ability to think critically."

Design Director, TELUS Digital

"The work she did on a recent landing page propelled the team from stuck to inspired. I’m continuously impressed by her and enjoy collaborating with her."

Senior Product Designer, TELUS Digital

"Randee takes action. Her ability to move forward with ambiguity is a valuable skill and helpful for others on the project with her."

Staff Product Designer, TELUS Digital
RFP

"Her designs were awesome and created a lot of energy and excitement within the response."

Senior Commercial Strategy & Operations Manager, TELUS Digital
BXD Pitch

"Randee has done fabulous work refining and coaching preparation of a Keynote deck for pitching Sony’s Business Exploration and Development group on our plan for their beta release platform for volumetric video. We could not have done this without her work."

Program Director, TELUS Digital

"Yesterday, with only a couple of hours’ notice Randee created brand new concept screens for our client-facing design review. When the client saw the concepts, they were instantly like ‘oh we NEED that!’"

Senior Product Designer, TELUS Digital

Fortrea

Healthcare · Clinical Research

Designing the mobile app that revolutionized how Fortrea's CRAs work in the field, later called the company's “crown jewel” software product.

Fortrea is a global contract research organization (CRO) that runs clinical trials for the pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device industries, spun off from Labcorp in 2023 with roots going back 30+ years. It operates in about 100 countries with roughly 14,000 employees. Clinical Research Associates (CRAs) are the field staff who keep those trials compliant, on schedule, and safe.

Role
Lead Product Designer
Timeline
January–October 2025
Team
2 Product Designers, Product Lead, Delivery Lead, Researchers, Engineering, Content Design, Strategist, AI Engineers. Composition shifted throughout the engagement.

Fortrea needed a mobile app for Clinical Research Associates (CRAs), the field staff keeping clinical trials compliant, on schedule, and safe. CRAs work in a highly regulated, high-stakes environment, so every decision had to hold up under that weight. None of us started as clinical trial experts either, so my teammates and I spent real time building fluency in CRA workflows and clinical research operations, an entirely different world, before we could design anything a CRA would trust and use.

Phase 1 · Jan–Mar 2025 · Sole designer

Building the design foundation

We started from nothing: no visual language, no design system, no developers yet, just a five-person team and a tight window to prove it out.

Once the direction was set, I built out actual tokens and variables in Figma so the team could stay visually consistent from the very start, well before developers were even staffed. It paid off past the design phase too: developers called this out specifically in retro as something that made onboarding into the project noticeably smoother. Another small piece of the same goal running through the whole engagement: build a workflow good enough that no one has to guess.

Figma design tokens: color, typography, spacing and grid, and border foundations
Color, typography, spacing, and border tokens set up as Figma variables
"We went from zero to one with this product with very little useful information to start out with; such compelling early work helped set the tone for the rest of the engagement." Program leadership, via a program lead's recommendation
Phase 2 · Apr–Jul 2025 · Lead designer

Building the MVP and the AI chatbot

I led design on the app's core features, working closely with our product lead and solutions architect to keep every concept technically feasible from day one. Without being asked, I learned a new prototyping tool in a single day and built a working iOS prototype the team could hold and test, before we had any developers on the project. That moment turned desktop mockups into something real and helped move the client toward continued investment.

Alongside the core app, the team built an AI chatbot so CRAs could get instant, cited answers to protocol and SOP questions in the field. It was a close collaboration between design, engineering, and content design.

Challenge

CRAs run multiple studies at once with direct accountability for patient safety and data integrity, so nothing we designed, including an AI feature giving them answers in the field, could just be fast. It had to be provably correct too.

Fortrea sizzle reel highlight
"The client's perception of clean, industry-leading product design, along with strategic thinking cutting to the core of CRA pain points, really built a foundation of trust and momentum towards additional fundraising." Program leadership, via a program lead's recommendation
Phase 3 · Aug–Oct 2025 · Lead designer

Scaling the program with the team

As the team grew from five people to nearly forty, I helped carry the "why" behind past decisions forward for every new hire. I stayed in regular, structured contact with our product lead and program lead throughout the engagement, over-communicating on what needed to ship and by when rather than letting that context live only in my head. I also pushed to start our own retrospectives, and made a habit of giving direct, sometimes critical, feedback in them instead of defaulting to politeness.

Out of those conversations I built the team's Design Backlog and, with our product lead, started a feature brief process that became the team's default workflow across design, engineering, and content: two ways of documenting decisions on a project with enough context and personnel turnover that things got lost if they only lived in someone's head. I ended up operating more like a product partner than a designer just executing tickets, and that broader ownership is part of what let the program scale as fast as it did.

When research had no dedicated owner, I stepped in to run it: planning CRA sessions, writing discussion guides, and delivering readouts to the client.

Process insight

Once the feature brief template existed, product and engineering kept using it on their own, without me in the room. That's the marker I look for: a process only really works once other people adopt it without being asked to.

15+research sessions led or co-led
40+CRAs took part
30+hours of qualitative research

CRAs volunteered extra time on top of demanding travel schedules to take part, a sign the work was landing.

Fortrea's Head of Product, speaking for the CRAs "The engagement with the CRAs not only will benefit the project, the product will be a better product, but we can report this out: the fact that we're doing this and getting valuable insights. We're truly listening to the voice here. We're not just going out and doing whatever we want. So I can proudly say the team's doing the right thing here. No one can challenge us. We have all the evidence."

I also put together a findings synthesis for the client from our design-led user research sessions, pulling the raw session notes into one deep-dive narrative the whole account could work from.

Becoming the program's storyteller

As the team grew, I became the person people came to when work needed to become a story for the client: pulling research, design, and business context into one narrative. This was one of the most satisfying parts of the program for me, turning scattered pieces into something the whole team could stand behind, whether it was my own work or a teammate's.

The clearest example: our first "State of the Research" readout came back from a feedback session as a fragmented set of findings. I volunteered to re-outline and redesign it into one coherent, evidence-based story, and that structure became the template for every research readout after it.

"It was really all of you who did the hard stuff, I was just the messenger. Big thank you to everyone for the collab and feedback on the deck, especially Randee for bringing the content to life with the slides." Senior Product Researcher, TELUS Digital, on the State of the Research presentation
"Randee elevated the quality of storytelling for the program. Each presentation was cohesive, polished, user-centered, and strategic." Program leadership, via a program lead's recommendation

Outcomes

Product & CRA impact
989CRAs equipped across 18 studies in 43 countries
100%task success in pilot usability testing
98%rated the AI chatbot good or excellent
My impact on TELUS Digital's business

These figures are a testament to what my work generated for TELUS Digital specifically, from our own engagement on the Fortrea contract rather than Fortrea's own business results.

$6.2M+engagement revenue to date, from a $270K discovery
$3.12Mclient investment signed immediately after discovery
15 to 31team size growth over the engagement
10/10client satisfaction, twice, from Fortrea's Head of Product
2xannual run rate growth within the first year

Fortrea's Head of Product specifically called out the design approach and usability of the app as a driver behind those scores when he relayed them back to the team.

"It's been great working alongside you. I really, really appreciate all the critical thinking and jamming on ideas and concepts, designing with the limited data that we had. I don't know where we would be without you. The designs are 10,000% better and I'm sure the client's excitement is mostly due to those." Principal Product Lead, TELUS Digital
"In my time with Randee on the Fortrea project, Randee excelled as a de facto Design Director, Product Lead, Engineering Manager, and client relationship manager extraordinaire. She would EASILY be able to step into a Senior Product Designer role; indeed, she already played that role and beyond." Content Designer, TELUS Digital (now Senior Staff Content Designer, Agentic AI at a fintech company)
What this proved

Fortrea started as a greenfield problem: no existing relationship, no foundation, so trust had to be earned from scratch. I thought outside the box to earn it, building the first prototype and shaping the discovery outbrief into a story that helped secure further investment, on top of designing every core feature in the product.

I also kept advocating for dedicated research support, and when we didn't have it, I ran it myself, then stayed proactive about learning from our own internal researchers once they joined. We refused to build this product without user input. For the team, I was just as strong an advocate for good process, documentation, and communication as I was for the work itself.

What this taught me

CRAs keep clinical trials safe, compliant, and on schedule, work I knew nothing about before this project. Getting it right meant learning an entire niche field from the ground up: protocol deviations, site visit workflows, the regulatory pressure CRAs operate under every day. Once that clicked for me, I wanted to make their jobs easier.

I've always taken ownership and initiative. This is the project where I fully stepped into that confidence: working outside my role's scope and level, and figuring out what the team needed as I went instead of waiting to be asked. I came out of it leading design at a scale I hadn't before, a more confident designer, communicator, and teammate.

Deep dives

A closer look at specific features and processes I led and contributed to.

Still a work in progress: I'm continuing to fill these in with more visuals and detail.

Context

CRAs needed fast, accurate answers to protocol and SOP questions in the field. I brought in content design early and helped scope this into its own feature.

Approach

Weekly design/dev syncs with engineering, product, and content design shaped how the bot handled study switching, ambiguity, and source citations. We prototyped and tested multiple navigation approaches with real CRAs, and partnered with Fortrea leadership on the bot's voice and tone.

Outcome

98%agreement the chatbot's quality was good or excellent
100%task success in pilot usability testing
4.73/5ease of use score
CRA voices

“I think [the chatbot] is a really good feature. It's easy to use and I could just quickly use the speaker option or just type what my questions are in that. So yeah, I absolutely love it.”

“Typically without [the chatbot], I would need to pull up the protocol, search for certain keywords, and if that keyword is all over that protocol section, you keep having to tap, tap, tap until you find what you need. That takes anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes to do. Having it where you can just type in or say what you need and it automatically pops up definitely saves a lot more time.”

A CRA piloting the app with live protocol/SOP data, in a research interview led by a TELUS Digital researcher, who also rated the chatbot a perfect 5/5 on accuracy, ease of finding information, time saved, and quality of work.

“You all are doing a great job. I'm really looking forward to this application.”

Diana Gutierrez, Fortrea Clinical Business Admin (former CRA and Clinical Team Lead), after testing the app and going out of her way to stress-test the chatbot's edge cases

Reflection

This was my first time designing an AI product with AI itself, I used Gemini constantly to move through ideas and drafts quickly. Before a dedicated conversation designer was staffed, I taught myself conversation design fundamentals, tone, error handling, fallback patterns, so the bot's flows weren't just guesswork, and worked closely with our AI engineer to understand what the model could realistically do. I also advocated for bringing a conversation designer onto the team once it was clear this needed dedicated ownership, and once they joined, partnering with them sharpened everything I'd been doing on my own. Designing AI, and increasingly designing alongside it, is a muscle I think product designers will keep building as it becomes a bigger part of the job, and this project is where I started building mine.

More praise from the account

Short notes from teammates across product, content design, research, and program leadership.

PenFed Credit Union

Financial Services · Loyalty

Designing PenFed's first member loyalty program: turning a broad business ask into a shared, member-centered definition of success, then carrying that alignment through every stakeholder conversation that followed.

PenFed Credit Union is one of the largest credit unions in the country, serving 2.8 million members through digital banking. TELUS Digital was brought in to help define and design a member loyalty program inside PenFed's existing digital banking experience.

Role
Lead / Sole Product Designer
Timeline
2026, active engagement, extended with Randee specifically requested
Team
1 Researcher, 1 Design Director, 1 Delivery Lead
Classic, Plus, and Premium tier account summary screens showing progressively richer Member Rewards benefits
Challenge

A loyalty program that couldn't disrupt what already worked

PenFed wanted a member loyalty program that recognized a member's full relationship with the credit union: deposits, borrowing, and everyday banking, beyond simple point-earning transactions. It had to live inside an existing digital banking experience that a large, often older and change-averse member base already trusted to just work. Any addition that got in the way of checking a balance or moving money would cost more trust than the program could ever earn back.

Solution

Surfacing loyalty inside everyday banking

The core idea: loyalty had to live inside the banking experience members already used, without disrupting the everyday tasks, checking a balance, moving money, that brought them there in the first place. The final design surfaces it progressively across three existing layers: Account Summary, Account Detail, and a dedicated Loyalty Hub, so a member gets a glance of value while banking as usual, and a full picture only when they intentionally go looking for it. I designed concepts across every layer for both web and mobile, for each of PenFed's member tiers.

The work went beyond adding a loyalty layer, some of those existing screens hadn't been meaningfully updated in years, so this was also a chance to modernize them. I kept that modernization deliberately restrained rather than a full redesign, given how change-averse that member base already was.

Three-layer information architecture: Account Summary, Account Detail, and Loyalty Hub, showing existing versus new loyalty elements surfaced progressively across web and mobile
Three layers: Account Summary, Account Detail, Loyalty Hub

Goals, outcomes, and paths, laddered on purpose

Every layer was designed to ladder into the one above it, so the final designs could be traced all the way back to a business goal instead of a standalone idea.

Business goals
Grow deposits Product penetration & reduce cost of originations Drive engagement & lower attrition Reduce credit losses
Desired member outcomes
Actionable guidance & tangible value Foundational clarity & visibility Recognition & support
Golden path designs
Discover & opt in Understand value Know what's next Understand tier changes

Four Golden Paths

From those outcomes, the team defined four "Golden Paths": the reasons behind a member's actions, beyond the actions themselves. Focusing stakeholders on those four before edge cases gave product and engineering a concrete structure to build from, and let everyone align early without overcommitting to UI.

  1. 01

    Discover their tier & opt in

    Understanding the program's value well enough to want in, in the first place.

  2. 02

    Understand value

    Understanding what their tier says about their relationship with PenFed.

  3. 03

    Know what to do next

    Knowing exactly what action would help them advance to the next tier.

  4. 04

    Understand tier changes

    Understanding why their tier changed, up or down, when it did.

I workshopped and validated these flows directly with the client in FigJam before we moved to hi-fi.

Where loyalty shows up in the design

Account Summary

Loyalty needed a presence on the very first screen every member sees, whether or not they've opted in. I designed a subtle status treatment that surfaces tier and progress at a glance, without adding a step to the everyday banking flow or crowding out the balances members open the app to check.

PenFed Account Summary redesign
Loyalty Hub Member Rewards screens across Classic, Plus, and Premium tiers

Loyalty Hub

The Loyalty Hub is where members go to actually engage with the program: track progress toward the next tier, review active benefits, and see the value they've earned. Because it's opt-in by nature, this is the one surface where I could go deeper without the same everyday-banking guardrails the other two screens needed.

Account Detail

On Account Detail, loyalty needed to connect the dots between everyday balances and program status without forcing a trip to the Loyalty Hub. I surfaced relevant benefits and progress inline with the account members were already looking at, so the connection felt native rather than bolted on.

Account Detail screens for Credit Card and Savings with loyalty benefits surfaced inline

Card showing average balance and autopay qualification paths toward the next tier

Complexity members never have to see

The program's qualification rules, balances, loans, exclusions, created real risk that members would end up doing math or calling support to understand their status. I designed ways to show progress and explain what counts in plain language, and worked through edge cases like downgrade risk, loan payoff, and reaching the top tier with no further room to climb.

Across every surface, I balanced visibility against intrusion for members who don't want their everyday banking flow changed.

Validated in usability testing

Across all rounds of testing, 96% of participants understood how to progress to the next tier when viewing the progress bar, and 86% correctly understood they could qualify via account balances or active loans on autopay.

What each tier of members actually needed

Each tier came with its own qualification criteria, benefits, and requirements, and solving for that complexity meant the copy had to flex too: written to resonate with each tier and stay easy to understand despite what was happening underneath. I took the first pass at that content.

Classic$2,500–9,999 or 1 loan

The tipping point from casual participation to full consolidation. Members wanted visible progress and small motivational gains, without ever feeling pressured into a loan just to keep their status.

Plus$10,000–29,999 or 2 loans

Strategically motivated but risk-aware. Approval anxiety and tier volatility were real concerns; members wanted transparency on financial impact before committing more deposits or products.

Premium$35,000+ or 3 loans

Heightened expectations, still actively evaluating. Members wanted visible, amplified rewards and ongoing proof that staying at the top stayed worth it, beyond the achievement of reaching it.

No Tier / MemberNot opted in or not yet qualified

Active evaluation and skepticism. Members compared competitors, questioned the effort to enroll, and wondered if there was a catch. Immediate, scannable value and transparent qualification criteria were what moved them to opt in.

Veteran / MilitaryAcross all tiers

Meaningful, identity-aligned value over symbolic recognition. Practical friction removal and curated benefits reflecting real Veteran partnerships mattered more than a badge.

Process

One outcomes workshop, one shared direction

PenFed came to the engagement with a business ask and little else: no existing loyalty IA, no defined layers, no plan yet for what the work even was. Jim, our Group Design Director, led the team through a Problem Space and Vision Workshop to start turning that ambiguity into direction. From there, I led the team through an Outcomes Workshop, roughly 20 client stakeholders across different PenFed teams, translating business goals into shared, member-centered outcome statements together, then facilitating a vote on which outcomes moved each goal the most. That work reframed the program around relationship-based financial behaviors instead of points and gamification, and gave the team a shared foundation to design against.

Sticky-note board of member outcome statements stamped by stakeholders during the outcomes workshop

We ranked the resulting statements by having the team vote each one against PenFed's business goals. Outcomes that scored well across multiple goals rose to the top, surfacing three themes.

Actionable guidance & tangible value

Members want to know exactly what to do next and why it pays off financially, beyond a status label alone.

Foundational clarity & visibility

Before anything deeper, members need a frictionless, unambiguous read on where they stand.

Recognition & support

Members do value being recognized, but "soft" benefits like celebration matter less day to day than the program's hard utility.

I led the team through a second workshop focused specifically on tier differentiation, surfacing the member needs shown above so the golden paths could flex by tier instead of describing one generic member.

Together, the two workshops grounded the golden paths in what PenFed's business goals needed and what five distinct member segments actually cared about, which usability testing later confirmed held up in practice.

A Design Direction Workshop, grounded in competitors

I also led the team through a Design Direction Workshop, reviewing competitor loyalty programs together and organizing what we saw by golden path, to see which visual elements resonated most with the PenFed team. That workshop set the initial design direction the rest of the work built from.

Competitive analysis slide: making loyalty value clear and tangible Competitive analysis slide: visualizing progress and surfacing next actions Competitive analysis slide: persistently showing loyalty presence Design Direction Workshop FigJam board, rating competitor apps by golden path

Explore alone, pressure-test with Jim, then bring in the team

From that initial direction, I explored on my own, turning golden path options into rough wireframes and initial prototypes, using tools like Gemini to move quickly through variations. From there I'd socialize it with the team and get in front of Jim, our Group Design Director, to pressure-test the thinking before it ever reached the client. Next came recurring design reviews with the client: I'd present, gather feedback, and iterate. Those calls pulled in different PenFed teams, UX, marketing, loyalty, so part of the job was staying clear on who was giving feedback, who was deciding, and who was accountable for what.

Owning the story: midpoint summary to final outbrief

Beyond the design work itself, I led the narrative and structure of every major presentation on this engagement, along with practically every review and synthesis that was client-facing. As a designer and consultant I lean on presentations deliberately: they keep the story focused and easy to follow, they're persuasive in a way loose findings aren't, and they facilitate real decision-making and feedback rather than a vague reaction.

The midpoint summary connected workshops, research, and stakeholder input into one throughline: what we did, what we learned, what it means, what's next. The final outbrief carried that same structure through to the finish. Both were presented in person at PenFed's headquarters.

Final outbriefClick through the interactive deck (Figma Slides)

Holding the center across conflicting stakeholders

Feedback arrived from every direction: executives focused on business impact, designers focused on UI, product and tech focused on feasibility. I acted as the point of synthesis, filtering what mattered from what was noise and adjusting how I framed the same work for each audience, rather than getting pulled into whichever conversation was loudest.

Day to day, that meant staying highly proactive across planning, organizing the work, presenting progress, managing the client relationship, and communicating up to my leads and across the team, on top of the execution itself. I also met daily with our researcher, who was junior, to mentor her and connect her findings back to concrete product decisions. Feedback and reviews came last in that list, but stayed just as much a part of the process as anything earlier in it.

Research

Validating the work through research

Our research team ran the interviews and focus groups shown in the breakdown below, while I built the Figma prototypes behind every round of testing and worked closely with our researcher to define exactly what we needed to test: a genuinely close collaboration that also included mentoring her earlier in her career.

We tested things like where the Loyalty Hub entry point should live (bottom nav vs. profile vs. a nav pill vs. an account card) and how to visualize tier progress (speedometer vs. progress bar), using first-click analysis, five-second tests, and intent-to-act scales instead of opinion alone, then iterated the designs against what we learned within our timeline.

Four research session participants on video calls
A few of the members who took part in testing
01

Generative Research

Participatory Workshops
  • Problem Space & Vision Workshop
  • Outcomes Workshop
  • Design Direction Workshop
Foundational Research
  • 7 executive stakeholder interviews
  • 4 product stakeholder focus groups
  • Light competitive analysis
02

Evaluative Research

Concept Testing

Tested the four initial golden paths
n = 14 participants

Usability Testing

Tested all four hi-fi golden paths
n = 103 participants across two rounds


"From the outset, Randee has driven the design process through the lens of the client's strategic business objectives. She has consistently kept that broader strategic objective in view: creating a loyalty program that provides real member value, supports product and service penetration and account growth, and does no harm to the current member experience." Group Design Director, TELUS Digital
What this proved

PenFed is a strategy-first case study: the hardest part wasn't the UI, it was building a shared definition of success out of noise, then protecting that definition through every stakeholder conversation that followed. It's the clearest example I have of product thinking and design craft operating as the same skill.

The Project Today

An engagement still earning its way into more

This engagement is still active, with me embedded solo as PenFed's lead product designer for loyalty, directly on their team. That kind of trust, being the only person from TELUS Digital regularly interfacing with the client on this account, doesn't happen without design earning it first, and it's already opening the door to new opportunities with PenFed beyond loyalty.

"Phase 2 of this project squarely rested on Randee's shoulders as our only designer, and she worked tirelessly, effectively, and efficiently, combining user feedback, client needs, and current best practices. PenFed loved her so much that they're currently in the process of trying to get her embedded into their own design team to help get the designs into their existing applications." Delivery Lead, TELUS Digital
September 2026, when he joined the account as its new BD lead as PenFed grows "You are very important to TELUS Digital, and you're very important to PenFed right now. You are doing the work... you're already their star player in the design category." Associate Principal, Business Development, TELUS Digital
Case Study 03 · Financial Services / Banking

Synchrony: building the design system the team never had

Role
Embedded Product Designer (sole WillowTree designer on the account)
Timeline
2023 to 2024, 14+ months
Surfaces
Synchrony.com marketing site, post-login Bank team experience
[ Add screenshots: design system / component library, savings product landing page, before/after homepage & nav ]

The challenge

The Synchrony Bank team had no formalized design system across its post-login and marketing experiences, no standard developer handoff process, and inconsistent CSS that was quietly costing page speed. None of that was assigned to me. I identified it and built the case for fixing it.

Proposing and building the system no one asked for

I approached the client directly with a recommendation to create and standardize a design system, then led the effort to build it and coached developers on how to use and extend it with reusable components. The impact was immediate: builds got faster and far more consistent once engineers had reusable components to work from, positioning the Bank team as the first mover toward a fully consolidated web experience other teams could point to. The system also reduced overall CSS and improved page speed, and I led the design system conversation with an internal team that closed a longstanding gap for the Bank group. One recommendation that came out of that work, FDIC logo placement, is still in use on synchrony.com.

Building process where there wasn't any

As the sole designer on a fast-moving account, I put process in place that hadn't existed before: a developer handoff process and regular syncs, planning meetings with the product owner, scrum master, and lead developers, refinement, design reviews, design validation, and requirements/acceptance-criteria writing. That structure is what let a solo-designer setup function like a fully staffed team.

From a landing page to a difficult renewal

When the client asked for a new landing page for Synchrony's savings product, I ran workshops with the acquisitions and marketing teams to uncover what each actually needed, then built the case for why the page mattered before designing it, moving the conversation from a request to a shared rationale.

Later, after a different WillowTree effort delivered homepage and navigation updates, the client came back wanting them changed, effectively asking to undo delivered work without new research. I brought in the design director, design partner, and an internal accessibility expert, reflected the client's concerns back to confirm we understood them correctly, and used a framework centered on goals, outcomes, and customer quotes to guide the conversation rather than react to it. I presented two options with clear pros and cons so the product manager could choose with the full picture, and for navigation partnered with the design director and design partner to find options that met the client's ask without breaking the experience for members. The result was a client who felt heard throughout and renewed the contract for six months.

Outcomes

Beyond the systems and process work, the client relationship itself became a differentiator. Synchrony stakeholders specifically cited the smoothness between design and development and continued to request the contract be extended.

"Even after she may no longer be working at SYF, her impact will be felt because of how she is improving processes... we'll be able to build faster because of how she's structuring her work for the developers." AVP / Product Manager, Synchrony Bank
"It's the smoothest it's ever been between design and development with Randee on the team. We haven't had anyone like Randee. Things are getting done faster with her on the team, and she's even pulled analytics into our decision-making, which has been huge in helping us move forward." Synchrony leadership, relayed by a TELUS Digital delivery lead
"Your Synchrony collaboration, in particular, is a signifier of talent a level above, if not several levels above, your current title." Design Director, TELUS Digital (manager review)
What this proved

Synchrony is where I learned to see and fix problems nobody assigned me: the design system, the handoff process, the renewal conversation nobody wanted to have. None of it was in a brief. All of it became the reason the client kept coming back.

Zumba

Fitness · D2C

Joining in the project's second phase, once strategy and research had wrapped, to help take a brand built on instructor licensing and DVDs direct-to-consumer for the first time, delivering MVP dev-ready designs in a five-week sprint.

Zumba is a global dance fitness brand with a business built on instructor licensing and DVD sales. To create a new direct-to-consumer revenue stream without losing the trust of its existing instructor community, TELUS Digital took the brand through a full digital transformation: market and user research, a proprietary forecast model to test pricing and viability, and a mobile app designed to replicate the energy of an in-person class. I joined once that discovery and strategy work had wrapped, brought on specifically to help turn the approved direction into shippable screens fast.

Role
Product Designer
Timeline
2023 · joined Phase 2, 5-week MVP sprint
Team
3 Product Designers, Product Lead, Researchers, Content Design, Engineering
Official case studyRead TELUS Digital's published write-up on this launch

Launching direct to consumer without losing the audience that built the business

Zumba's entire business had run on instructors licensing choreography and selling DVDs rather than a direct relationship with the people taking classes. Launching a consumer app meant building trust with a brand new audience while protecting the instructor community the business still depended on. By the time I joined, strategy and research had already set the direction; the challenge in front of design was executing that direction fast without losing craft.

Challenge

Zumba needed the MVP to prove out a new business model fast, which meant every team, including design, had to stay laser-focused on the core experience rather than every idea worth exploring.

Competitive analysis mattered a lot to this client specifically: showing not just what we recommended but how it stacked up against what competitors were already doing. We made a habit of grounding presentations in that rationale throughout the engagement.

"Randee did a ton of competitive analysis for onboarding, registration, and video discovery, grounding our solutions in reality in a way that genuinely resonated with the client. She also stepped up organizing components into our library, so we could hand off files when the project ended without scrambling." Senior Product Designer, TELUS Digital

Contributing across the app, owning the On-Demand tab

Across that five-week sprint I contributed to multiple features alongside the other two designers, but owned the On-Demand tab outright. I built research-driven concepts and designed the custom components the feature needed, all within that condensed timeline.

The On-Demand tab filter and refinement flow
The On-Demand tab's filter and refinement flow, one of the features I owned end to end
"I was also particularly impressed with Randee's work on the On-Demand tab of Zumba's app, which was arguably one of our hardest features. She owned this feature with confidence and created custom components and a prototype for our final presentation." Product Designer, TELUS Digital

Weaving the prototype into the story itself

For the final stakeholder presentation, we built the prototype by flow directly into the deck itself rather than as a standalone Figma link, weaving the high-fidelity screens together with the context behind each decision. Tailoring how the story got told mattered as much as the designs themselves: stakeholders saw the reasoning and the finished experience in the same breath, which made the direction easier to follow, easier to approve, and more memorable once the meeting ended.


Outcomes

Launch impact
400K+app downloads within four months of launch
4.7+star rating across the App Store and Google Play
No. 1Best New Subscription, SubSummit Cube Awards
Zumba's Chief Consumer Officer, on the partnership "We were excited to partner with TELUS Digital in this transformation, and infuse innovation into a highly established brand and business. TELUS Digital provided us with the right frameworks to ensure that the internal teams stayed laser-focused on launching the MVP, with the ultimate goal of reaching user satisfaction at scale."
What this proved

Zumba was proof I could take full ownership of a feature and deliver it with confidence: research-driven concepts, custom components, and a prototype good enough to carry a final stakeholder presentation, on the same timeline as everything else shipping around it.

Outside of the design execution itself, this project proved that being highly proactive, and knowing when to take ownership versus delegate, is a skill of its own. Ramping up on an unfamiliar project in days instead of weeks let our team move straight into high-fidelity design work without losing momentum, and that speed is part of why the final designs landed as well as they did. It's proof I can work fast without sacrificing quality or impact.

Zumba FitDownload the app on the App Store
Project Highlight · Food Service / POS

Domino's

Independent feature ownership on Domino's Pulse

Role: Contributing Product Designer (2023)

[ Add screenshots: shipped features, design system components ]

I independently owned and designed multiple features for Domino's Pulse, the point-of-sale platform used by front-of-house team members running the store counter, and contributed new components to Domino's design system, collaborating closely with their in-house design and product team. My documentation was thorough enough that it became a reference point for the team's own process.

"I feel like in the short time that you've been here, you've impacted our process so much, and you've just been so thorough with everything... you're just very good at thinking through everything and being detailed." Domino's Product Designer
"You've done work outside the scope of design which really sheds a light on how we can improve our process." Domino's Lead Product Designer
Project Highlights · 2022 to 2025

Other Work

A handful of shorter engagements that didn't need a full case study but still shaped how I work: stepping into unfamiliar industries on tight timelines and getting to a confident recommendation fast.

Hospitality
Best Western Hotels: a navigation fix under pressure
Hospitality Navigation Executive Presentation

Brought in during a high-pressure period to solve a navigation challenge. I grounded recommendations in research, best practices, and brand principles, then translated them into an executive-ready presentation with prototypes that made the implications easy to evaluate. The client approved the direction immediately.

"Randee, great to meet you, and thank you so much for the thought that went into this. This is a really productive way to look at this and understand the ways you're thinking about it. I think you're hitting all the right areas." Chief Technology Officer, Best Western Hotels
Insurance
Guardian: a prototype that outgrew the ask
Insurance Feature Concept Prototype

Brought in on a short timeline to support a client request for a feature design concept. The ask was a set of high-fidelity concepts; I went a step further and built an interactive prototype in Figma Make. It was well received enough that it directly contributed to ongoing conversations about bringing design support back to the account.

Telecom
TELUS Billing: a blue-sky reimagination
Telecom Blue Sky Vision Executive Sponsor

A ground-up reimagination of the billing experience, kicked off at the request of an EVP. I was the only fully allocated team member, running goals alignment and rapid concepting while presenting directly to senior TELUS and TELUS Digital leadership.

"As the only 100% allocated member of the team, Randee is the powerhouse keeping this project rolling, grabbing ideas, nuggets of information, and strategic inputs to spin up great concepts and lay out decks at an impressive speed." Staff Content Designer, TELUS Digital
← All work

Let's talk

I'm always open to a conversation about design roles where I can own a product end-to-end. If any of this work is relevant to what you're building, I'd love to hear from you.

Randee Rose, Product Designer, currently at TELUS Digital, formerly WillowTree. Client details reflect real engagement outcomes drawn from internal performance and feedback records.