EvoLite Design System

Overview

While Guest Payments ultimately delivered a streamlined non-authenticated payment experience, the project began as something much larger: an experiment in improving how design and cross-functional teams collaborated.

As project timelines became increasingly compressed, design teams were often expected to complete discovery, requirements gathering, and solution design within the same sprint. This created unnecessary pressure, limited exploration, and reduced opportunities for innovation.

To challenge this approach, I proposed and led a design-focused hackathon initiative that provided teams with dedicated discovery and design runway before development began. Using Guest Payments as the pilot project, two cross-functional teams explored competing solutions to the same business problem, demonstrating the impact that structured discovery and collaborative planning could have on both design quality and delivery confidence.

Business Context

At the beginning of each Program Increment (PI), design teams were routinely asked to produce production-ready solutions within active development sprints. Requirements were often still evolving, discovery activities were incomplete, and teams lacked a consistent framework for defining success before design work began.

These conditions created inefficiencies across product, design, and engineering while limiting opportunities to fully explore customer needs and alternative solutions.

The Guest Payments initiative was intentionally structured to test a different approach—one that prioritized upfront discovery, stakeholder alignment, and collaborative ideation before development commitments were made.

The objective was not simply to design a payment experience, but to demonstrate how additional planning and cross-functional engagement could improve both team velocity and solution quality.

Team Structure

To create a realistic delivery environment, the design organization was divided into two independent teams.

Each team consisted of:

• Two Product Designers

• Product Owner

• Business Analyst

• Engineering Partners

• Quality Assurance Representatives

This structure ensured that every concept was evaluated through the lens of customer experience, business requirements, technical feasibility, and implementation readiness.

Project Framework

The initiative followed a four-week accelerated delivery model:

Week 1 — Discovery & Research

Teams conducted stakeholder interviews, reviewed business requirements, analyzed customer needs, and identified key opportunities within the existing payment experience.

Week 2 — Concept Development

Each team independently explored solution concepts, workflows, interaction models, and experience strategies.

Week 3 — Refinement & Validation

Concepts were refined through stakeholder reviews, feasibility discussions, and collaborative critique sessions.

Week 4 — Development Readiness

Designs were prepared for implementation with engineering support, ensuring recommendations were grounded in platform capabilities and delivery constraints.

Team 1

Optimization Through Simplicity

The first team focused on creating the most efficient and implementation-ready solution possible.

Their approach emphasized streamlined user flows, reduced friction, and alignment with existing design system patterns. The resulting experience minimized complexity while maximizing speed to market and implementation efficiency.

This concept demonstrated how thoughtful planning and clear requirements could significantly improve delivery outcomes without introducing unnecessary customization.

The second team approached the challenge as an opportunity to explore the future evolution of Prudential’s digital experience.

Inspired by Prudential’s recently introduced “Now What?” brand campaign, the team developed a more immersive and visually expressive experience that reimagined how Omniscript-based interactions could support the broader Newport Design System.

While the concept required greater development investment, it illustrated how dedicated discovery time creates space for innovation, long-term thinking, and exploration beyond immediate delivery constraints.

Team 2

Future Evolution of Prudential’s digital experience.

Inspired by Prudential’s recently introduced “Now What?” brand campaign, the team developed a more immersive and visually expressive experience that reimagined how Omniscript based interactions could support the broader Newport Design System.

While the concept required greater development investment, it illustrated how dedicated discovery time creates space for innovation, long-term thinking, and exploration beyond immediate delivery constraints.

Production

The teams went back to their original assignments and one team was chosen to take on refining and moving this into production. Matt Chen, a designer whom reports to me, was placed on the team that got the call.

Armed with feedback from senior leaders, as well as a full stack team, the goal was to get something live by the end of the PI. With a massive bank of idea’s the team got to work. On one of my weekly check in’s with Matt I found a chance to mentor.

The URLs for Salesforce are clunky and not ideal for SEO, I explained this to Matt and he understood we needed to change it, but not why.

The user, potentially, will not be starting their journey on Prudential.com. Then where he asked.

I told him, it was most likely in the search bar of their browser, or google. The ahh-ha moment happened. We then devised a plan knowing we would have to have a custom page built outside of Salesforce to ensure we could SEO optimize that page for search.

Workin with Becca, and the Prudential.com team, the started work on a page with the URL www.prudential.com/make-a-payment, which was later changed to www.Prudential.com/personal/life-insurance/make-a-li-payment to ensure scaleability for other payment options.

Impact and Outcomes