project story
A Canadian Financial Institution
Design Impact Program
From stuck to scaling: Unlocking strategic design impact inside a Canadian financial institution
How one design team grew their confidence, sharpened their facilitation skills, and began shifting their influence from the sidelines to the strategy table.
Challenge
This Canadian financial services organization had bold ambitions for digital transformation and customer experience innovation. But the design team tasked with helping to lead that charge was facing a tough internal reality.
Team members often found themselves brought in late to projects, working reactively rather than strategically. Stakeholder engagement was inconsistent and frequently adversarial. Meetings felt rushed, roles were unclear, and design was often seen as a support function, not a driver of business impact. A sales-driven culture and low organizational awareness of design further reinforced this dynamic, leaving the team underutilized and uncertain of their value.
The design leaders knew something needed to shift—but they didn’t just want better workshops. They wanted a stronger foundation for scaling design maturity.
Approach
The Moment’s Design Impact Program began with a diagnostic phase to surface what’s really going on. We conducted stakeholder interviews and team sessions to assess the current state of design capability and map the organizational barriers holding the team back.
Findings revealed five core tensions:
- Untapped strategic value in the team’s capabilities.
- Lack of integration with business and product decision-making.
- Misalignment between team roles and broader organizational expectations.
- Low visibility into business context, making it hard to position design recommendations.
- Growth opportunities that extended well beyond tactical facilitation.
From there, we designed a coaching and alignment program tailored to the team’s context and goals.
This included:
- Team coaching sessions to strengthen core facilitation and stakeholder engagement skills.
- Individual coaching to help team members apply new practices directly to live project contexts.
- Skill-building around conflict navigation, strategic questioning, setting boundaries, and understanding power dynamics in hybrid and cross-functional environments.
The coaching was not just about “running better workshops.” It was about preparing the team to work more effectively with leaders, navigate difficult personalities, and assert their role in shaping better outcomes for customers and the business.
Impact
Although the broader organization remained complex and change-resistant, the design team itself began to show real transformation.
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Increased confidence: Team members reported feeling more equipped and calm in difficult conversations. They developed stronger awareness of their facilitation roles and how to support each other in high-stakes moments.
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Improved alignment: Workshops became more focused and productive, with clearer boundaries and more consistent delivery practices.
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Strategic optimism: The team began to see themselves not just as executors, but as enablers of change—capable of guiding others and influencing upstream.
"Our design team encountered challenging stakeholdering situations, resulting in confusion and slow progress on our projects. We sought out coaching from The Moment to help us gain perspective, improve our strategic facilitation skills and elevate the trust between design and other teams. Through team workshops and individual coaching sessions, we identified practical approaches to use in our design process. We are now more confident, and prepared to tackle tricky stakeholder meetings and continue pushing design forward."
– Director of Customer Experience Innovation
Whats Next
While the coaching program equipped the team with practical tools and mindsets, systemic change is still needed for design to reach its full potential.
Our final recommendations pointed the way:
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Map how design, product, and business functions intersect to reveal system-level barriers.
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Co-create new working agreements to operationalize collaboration and clarify roles.
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Coach into change, not just on paper, but in action—building a reflective, adaptive culture that evolves as it scales.
This story shows what’s possible when design teams are supported not just to execute, but to influence. And while this project ended after the initial coaching phase, it opened a door for deeper partnership—to help this organization scale lasting design maturity across their enterprise.
Project Leads
Mark Kuznicki
Partner
Mark (he/him) is passionate about supporting purpose-driven leaders navigating complexity and transformation. He believes that change happens by meeting people where they are while pointing the way to their highest potential.
Karen Oikonen
Principal
Karen (she/her) believes that real change starts with deeply understanding people. A lifelong explorer and champion of the human experience, she is committed to creating inclusive, participatory engagement with diverse communities.