Award-winning, 2-sided Retirement Platform

AIG VALIC, was a retirement plan provider for not-for-profit organizations, including a dashboard for administrators and a retirement platform for employees

  • Future Fit was used by employees for retirement planning 

  • SponsorFit was used by plan administrators for insight into plan participation, financial monitoring, ROI, etc.

IMPACT

Business Results for AIG

  • Revenue: Exceeded targets and achieved #1 ranking by DALBAR, the independent rating company for retirement plan quality

  • Strategic outcome: Transformed how Valic understood user behavior—from demographics and personas to behavioral triggers and life moments. This approach influenced product strategy across the business unit

  • Cross-functional impact: The pattern library reduced design and development time for subsequent projects by 40%, accelerating time-to-market across the portfolio.

THE SITUATION

From call center data, anecdotal feedback, and site analytics, the plan administrator’s needs and goals were not being met. 

  • Lacked the data aggregation and functionality needed for financial oversight of managing employee benefits. 

  • Missing basic functionality, such as data import and export, and flexible reporting.

  • Unmet business goals for the retirement

  • Not enough employees were participating in the offering 

  • The plan participants were not contributing enough

AIG/Valic was losing market share to competitors, and its DALBAR industry rating declined, threatening enterprise sales.

Results for employee platform, FutureFIT 

  • Increased transaction volume across contribution changes and portfolio adjustments

  • Increased likelihood of users raising 401k / 403b contributions during life-trigger moments

Employee retirement platform, FutureFIT

Results for plan administrator platform, FutureFIT

Pilot launched 3 weeks early due to streamlined scope, design pattern library, and new types of collaboration and integration of the Experience Design team

Administrator, retirement plan management platform, SponsorFIT

STRATEGIC BET

  • Dual track agile to balance the urgency to launch with user-centered design. Specifically, decision-making that referenced user research, market insights, VALIC team learnings, call center insights, and analytics

  • Partnership with QA teams for design and accessibility QA, compressing timelines

  • Re-think the plan participant experience to focus on 11 life events, and intentions (JTBD), moving away from age-based personas

PUSHBACK

  • The urgency of launch deprioritized client satisfaction data and user experience

  • Resistance to talking with high-value clients and plan administrators, and the concern of putting the relationships at risk

  • EXD teams based in NYC and all other teams were in Houston - concern that the distance slowed delivery and the ability to pivot

  • Burnout from NYC teams - to meet the stakeholder expectations, the teams spent one week a month in Houston, TX

EXECUTION

  • Experience Design team’s participation in big-room planning for t-shirt sizing on key functionality

  • Introduction of design pattern library, including accessibility training

  • Insights gathering with plan administrators, including joint design sessions

  • Employee research, including usability, discovery, and insights

  • Design thinking sessions for faster alignment on roadmap priorities

OPERATIONALIZATION

  • Two remote experience design teams, one for SponsorFit and one for FutureFit.

  • Introduced a local design team to cross both projects and introduced paired design, 

  • Transitioned from three teams to the local team for faster iteration loops and paired solutioning.

Hinge, AIG’s digital pattern library

PARTNERSHIPS

  • Product Owners 

  • CTO Enterprise and Division

  • Front-end programmers

  • System and data engineers 

  • QA teams 

  • Client Partners and Sales teams