Rethinking Reporting at RBC Wealth Management
Turning a complex legacy modernization initiative into a more focused, scalable, and user-centered product strategy.
Impact at a glance:
500+ advisor teams Tested the platform by its second iteration
87% adoption Targeted within the first six months
~60% faster Report customization
67% less time To generate individual reports
30–40 clients Supported in a single bulk reporting workflow
My role and responsibilities
Senior Manager, Product Design
December 2025 – October 2026
Led a team of designers and researchers, partnering with Product, Engineering, and Business leaders to shape product direction, improve delivery, and strengthen the organization's design capabilities.
The challenge: An ambitious vision without a clear path to value
Financial advisors at RBC Wealth Management relied on reporting tools that had evolved over more than 20 years. The experience was fragmented, time-consuming, and inconsistent, making it difficult to prepare and present financial information to clients.
The organization had an ambitious plan to replace these systems with a modern reporting platform. But when I joined, the roadmap stretched nearly two years, with much of the design work driven by external vendors and business requirements.
The team was producing solutions, but we weren't consistently validating them with advisors. Designs focused on ideal scenarios, important edge cases were being overlooked, and decisions were often made through large stakeholder reviews.
Meanwhile, the business needed to deliver value sooner.
The challenge wasn't simply designing a better reporting tool. It was finding a way to move faster without compromising quality or losing sight of the long-term vision.
01. Shifting the strategy from one big delivery to incremental value
I started by meeting with Product Managers, Engineering leaders, and Business stakeholders to understand their priorities, constraints, and concerns.
These conversations helped reveal a gap between the ambition of the roadmap and what the organization could realistically deliver.
I challenged the assumption that we needed to build the entire platform before putting it in advisors' hands.
Working with Product and Engineering, we reframed the approach around an MVP, prioritizing the essential reporting workflows and moving advanced customization capabilities into future releases.
This wasn't simply about reducing scope. It was about making deliberate trade-offs: delivering meaningful value earlier while creating opportunities to learn from real users.
We moved from trying to deliver everything at once to building a foundation we could validate and evolve.
02. Building shared understanding before building solutions
One of the challenges I noticed early on was that different teams held different pieces of knowledge about the product.
We were moving quickly, but we didn't have a shared understanding of what we knew, what we were assuming, and what still needed to be explored.
I organized and facilitated a discovery workshop to bring those perspectives together.
We mapped our existing knowledge, surfaced assumptions and unanswered questions, and identified where research could have the greatest impact.
The workshop helped turn fragmented knowledge into a shared starting point for the team and informed our research priorities.
It also changed the nature of our conversations. Rather than immediately debating solutions, we could focus on understanding the problems and the evidence needed to make better decisions.
03. Using AI to make complex scenarios easier to explore
Financial reporting involves a wide range of configurations, data combinations, and business rules. Static prototypes made it difficult to explore how these scenarios would behave in practice.
We introduced AI into our prototyping process, using a structured data matrix to explore different report configurations and create more realistic interactions.
This gave us a more tangible way to discuss functionality, uncover requirements, and explore edge cases with Business stakeholders before committing to development.
Rather than using AI simply to produce designs faster, we used it to support discovery and improve the quality of our conversations.
AI became a tool for exploring complexity and building shared understanding, not just accelerating production.
04. Raising the quality of the experience and the way we worked
The strategic shift also required changes to how Design, Product, and Engineering collaborated.
I introduced more structured design critiques, encouraged earlier collaboration with developers, and helped the team move beyond reviewing screens toward solving end-to-end experience problems.
We revisited critical workflows, including client and account selection, report creation, complex financial tables, and scenarios that had been overlooked in the initial designs.
One important shift was expanding our attention beyond the advisor-facing interface.
The final report was a key touchpoint between RBC and its clients, yet its presentation had received limited attention.
We worked to improve the clarity, consistency, and branding of the reports themselves, recognizing that the experience didn't end when an advisor clicked “Generate Report.”
At the same time, I led the hiring and onboarding of two Senior Product Designers and a UX Researcher, strengthening our internal capabilities and reducing reliance on external vendors.
Together, these changes helped establish a more collaborative, research-informed approach to product development while supporting delivery commitments.
05. Delivering measurable improvements
The new platform improved the efficiency of key reporting workflows.
Report customization became approximately 60% faster. A task that previously took 35–40 minutes could now be completed in around 15 minutes.
Individual report generation time dropped by 67%. For a client with four accounts, advisors could generate a report in five minutes instead of 15.
Bulk reporting supported 30–40 clients in a single workflow, making quarterly portfolio reviews more efficient and reducing repetitive manual work.
By the second iteration, more than 500 advisor teams had tested the platform, representing approximately 20% of RBC's network of more than 2,500 teams. The program also targeted 87% adoption within the first six months.
These improvements helped reduce the operational effort involved in preparing financial reports, giving advisors more time to focus on client meetings and relationships.
[Suggested visual: Three large outcome metrics alongside the redesigned reporting experience.]
What I took away
This experience reinforced something I believe strongly about design leadership: our impact goes beyond the products we help build. It's also about improving how teams make decisions and work together.
The most meaningful changes weren't limited to the interface. They came from questioning the delivery strategy, creating alignment around what mattered, building stronger design and research capabilities, and giving the team space to learn as we delivered.
By connecting business priorities, user needs, and execution, we helped turn a complex modernization effort into a more focused and sustainable product initiative.
For me, that's what effective design leadership looks like: creating clarity, empowering teams, and turning complex problems into products that deliver meaningful results.