Dan McLaughlin

Responsible for bridging the gap between business needs, product strategy, and technical execution. I ensure that product requirements are clearly defined, prioritised, and successfully delivered by the Engineering Team, driving business value and enhancing user experiences.

Responsibilities include co-ordination of Product Requirements, leadership of Engineering Team delivery and shaping, definition and validation of requirements through user research, competitive analysis and feedback loops. I manage the delivery backlog across Engineering squads websites, managing delivery of multiple workstreams.

UX Designer for Collecting Cars and Watch Collecting., the first member of the design team at The Collecting Group Aligned to agile feature team, I was responsible for digital experience design, from initial research and ideation through to prototyping, customer testing and optimisation.

Account Management role within web and mobile delivery team, facing out to business leads in Aviva Direct, Life and Intermediary & Partnership teams. Close working relationship with stakeholders required to understand existing digital capability and business objectives, benchmarking these against the Digital and Architecture strategies, and co-creating roadmaps to support the prioritisation and delivery of digital change. Provided UX support and end-to-end project management where appropriate.

Aligned to multiple strategic projects over a 7 year period as a member of Aviva’s in-house UX, UI Design and UX Research team. I worked across multiple brands in that time, on both direct to consumer and B2B deliveries.

Responsible for the design and optimisation of digital products across the change portfolio, conducted customer research in the form of formal labs, guerilla testing and contextual analysis. I built up a good working knowledge of Accessibility with the support of my team and and became and advocate of Design Sprints, having run multiple virtual workshops over the past couple of years to great effect.

Strong attention to detail, wireframing and prototyping skills, most recently in Figma, can deal with complex deliveries across multiple workstreams, requiring the ability to articulate design to, and collaborate effectively with, stakeholders at all levels.

Dual focus with this role: key responsibility the interpretation, scoping and shaping of demand requests into the web and mobile delivery teams. This required close collaboration with business owners to understand and document their requirements, articulate these and obtain estimates from the respective disciplines (UX, Design, Dev, Tech, Test, Optimisation etc). Close alignment with scheduling team required to provide clarity on delivery dates (waterfall) and in supporting the transition to agile feature/platform team model.

Interpreted and collated demand across Digital Integration team (Web & Mobile delivery, eSecurity, Customer Data, Data Analytics, Integration & Messaging), co-created a Kanban board for business area leads, chaired regular forums to review, and collaborated to identify challenges and opportunities with resourcing and priorities.

Account Management role within Aviva Web Operations team (in-house development centre incorporating UX, Design, html and Tech development, Analytics and Optimisation), responsible for stakeholder management, resource planning, scoping and shaping for the majority of deliveries, UX and/or end-to-end project management in appropriate cases.

Contributed to the development of UK Digital strategy in conjunction with external consultancy: establishing the case for digital investment to UK exec. Lead role in articulation of digital vision for UK Direct team.

Equivalent to Product Owner role: responsibility for process completion and new business conversion for the Aviva Direct digital journeys. Content owner for the direct product set and custodian of customer quote & apply journeys.

Responsible for continuous optimisation, utilising feedback from customers, product and operational teams, benchmarking, user testing and agency feedback to deliver a coherent change roadmap to continually drive performance. Responsible for briefing changes into IT teams, from bau fixes to major projects such as the Aviva rebrand and back-end migration to Exceed.

Member of Aviva's inaugural UX team, working across multiple domains including norwichunion.com, rac.co.uk and bsm.co.uk. Responsibility for definition of user journeys across customer-facing sites and applications including RAC Route Planner, providing consultancy on new proposition launches, optimising existing journeys and clean-sheet Information Architecture. Tasks included the creation of personas, site maps and wireframes, the facilitation of in-house user testing, the commissioning of external research and the management of agency resources.