Moody’s Analytics
Transforming design operations
Impact summary
💰 $1.1M annual savings through process automation
⚡ 30x faster alignment (3 hours vs. 1 month)
🔄 Cultural transformation from waterfall to Dual-Track Agile
👏 Executive recognition for organizational impact
The challenge
When I joined Moody’s Analytics as Director of User Experience, the organization was struggling with outdated workflows that were slowing delivery and creating friction between teams. Design specifications were created manually through a labor-intensive process that was expensive and error-prone. The team operated in waterfall-style workflows that prevented the rapid iteration and collaboration that modern product development requires. There was no bridge between design and engineering, which led to miscommunication and rework.
These were not just process problems, but cultural barriers that would require organizational change to solve.
My role
I led a transformation of how design operated within the organization focusing on 3 key areas: automating expensive manual processes, introducing modern collaborative practices, and restructuring the team to bridge the design-engineering gap. My goal was to reduce costs, increase speed and fundamentally change how teams worked together.
The approach
Making the business case for automation
Shortly after joining Moody’s, I identified that our manual redlining process (creating detailed design specifications by hand) was consuming significant design resources. Proposing automation wasn’t just about choosing a tool, but also required building organizational understanding and buy-in for a fundamental change in how we worked.
I led a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis that quantified both the direct financial impact and the opportunity cost of continuing with manual processes. I presented the findings to leadership and worked across the organization to ensure stakeholders understood what would change and why it mattered.
The transition to automated redlining tools was approved, with a projected annual cost reduction of $1.1 million in design expenses. Importantly, it freed designers to focus on higher-value work rather than production tasks.
Design thinking workshop bringing together product, design, engineering, and business stakeholders to rapidly align on solutions.
Disrupting waterfall with modern practices
The organization had deeply entrenched waterfall-style approaches that created dysfunction including long planning cycles, limited collaboration, late feedback, and slow adaptation to change.
I introduced and led the organization’s first design sprints, workshops, and Dual-Track Agile practices. These were not just new processes, but new ways of thinking about how work gets done. I ran multiple workshops that enabled cross-functional teams to align on complex problems in hours rather than weeks. In one case, a 3-hour workshop produced consensus that a Managing Director estimated would have taken a month otherwise. These experiences demonstrated the power of structured, facilitated collaboration over extended back-and-forth.
Strategy blueprint and impact-effort matrix from design workshops. Sessions like these consistently compressed weeks of decision-making into hours. One 3-hour workshop produced alignment that would have taken a month otherwise.
The shift was not immediate, but it was successful. Teams began to adopt these practices independently, and I received direct praise from top-level leadership for modernizing how the organization approached product development.
Bridging design and engineering
To further accelerate delivery and improve collaboration, I advocated for adding a design-aware front-end developer to the design team, an unconventional structure at the time. I proposed a dual reporting relationship where the developer would report to both design and engineering, creating a bridge between disciplines rather than a handoff.
The addition proved transformative to the organization. The front-end developer could contribute to design discussions with technical context, build high-fidelity prototypes quickly, and work directly with engineering to ensure designs were implemented as intended. The role became a force multiplier for the entire team, improving both speed and quality.
The outcome
The changes resulted in measurable projected cost savings ($1.1M annually from automation alone) and faster delivery cycles, but the bigger impact was cultural as the organization moved from waterfall to more collaborative, iterative practices. Cross-functional collaboration also improved dramatically.
The feedback I received from stakeholders and colleagues during a 360-degree assessment reflected this shift:
“Excellent at cross communicating and educating between disciplines.”
“Her team integration has been seamless—she’s new to the team but has done a fantastic job getting settled in and making a huge impact.”
“Excellent collaboration and leadership skills. The design sprints are a major example of this.”
“Maria’s workshops are amazing. She should keep honing the process.”
What I learned
Transforming how organizations work requires more than introducing new processes. It requires demonstrating value, building understanding and giving people experience with better ways of working. The design sprints were successful not just because they were good process, but because they showed teams what was possible when they collaborated differently.
Structural changes like the front-end developer role proved to be powerful catalysts for cultural change. By physically embedding someone who bridges disciplines, we made collaboration the default rather than something teams had to work to achieve.
Making the business case early was important. The redlining analysis showed leadership that design could drive cost savings and operational efficiency, not just improve user experience. That track record gave me the credibility to propose bigger changes to how teams worked together.