The Quarterly Review: Chase’s Chief Design Officer Miki Van Cleave is digging into discovery and building better experiences

Notes from the desk: Welcome to this month’s Quarterly Review, a series where I dive into what executives from some of the best brands in financial services are focusing on in this quarter, as well as how they are planning to achieve their goals. It’s a chance for the industry to learn about what goes on behind an FI’s four walls and how leadership manages their priorities. 

But that’s not all: a review implies no mandates, a check in. So stay tuned next quarter to learn whether the executive achieves her plans and translates theory into reality.

In this edition we will
focus on Miki Van Cleave,
Chief Design Officer
at Chase.

The bigger an organization, the harder it is to ensure that customer and employee experiences speak the same language. One of Chase’s Chief Design Officer Miki Van Cleave’s key objectives is to ensure there is harmony between the firm’s customer and employee experiences. 

Van Cleave assumed the role seven months ago after spending five years as Head of Design for the firm’s CI&A (Customer Identity & Authentication) and Consumer Banking, where she built multiple design teams and worked on creating interconnected experiences.

Before Chase, Miki held several leadership roles at USAA Federal Savings Bank. She ran the bank’s innovation team and designed its auto experience product. 

Today she is here to share how she is strategizing for growth in her new role by breaking silos, digging into Chase’s backend processes, and building more confidence in product delivery and design processes of the firm.

The focus: Growth, codifying discovery processes, and improving employee experiences

I stepped into the role of Chief Design Officer in August 2024, and since then my goal has been to learn as much as I can and hit the ground running, picking up where my predecessor left off. The team achieved so much in 2024, and my goal is to keep up the team’s awesome momentum in delivering great experiences and products to our customers in Q1 2025 and beyond. Some of the key achievements in 2024 include increasing our investment in our teams in India, which has been a multi-year focus, and gaining clarity on our body of work (BOW) and improved team allocations to enable us to work more efficiently. 

Something I am really proud of is that we started a Challenge Coin recognition program in Design & Customer Experience. Inspired by military coins, I hand out Challenge Coins in person to those employees who have been nominated as showing up and willing to help.

1. Enhancing employee experiences: Customer-centric design continues to be at the forefront of our design strategy and we’re constantly working on new ways to enhance experiences for our customers and employees. Employees in our branches and answering our customers’ calls are the lifeblood of Chase, and it’s crucial we equip them with the right tools and resources to do their jobs. The team is so good at their craft, they know the space and know how to deliver great products. The next level of maturity for us will be to raise our business acumen and continue elevating our presence and profile within the design, product, tech, and data teams and business partners.

2. Building up: We’re currently focused on continuing our overall growth, building on what we accomplished in 2024. This includes ongoing conversations to align on a detailed BOW (Body of Work) and broader awareness across the organization’s leadership on driving efficiencies as we grow and evolve the team.

3. Discovery processes: I also want to codify our approach to discovery, which will help to raise our confidence on new product delivery and get alignment with our partners on the ROI of design. We’ve seen success in formalizing other processes and problem-solving approaches, like our “Customer Why Template,” and know there is value in continuing to standardize processes for better collaboration.

Plan of action

It’s important for us to stay focused on our objectives, while continuing to cultivate new ideas.

The key is to avoid being distracted in a fast-moving environment and stay the course.

1.  Working beyond silos: It’s critical that we look beyond our own team to solve problems and come up with new ideas. We want to avoid silos and collaborate with other teams to help us understand and better solve a customer issue. A design challenge isn’t always going to be solved by the design team alone; sometimes we need to enlist the support and ideas of people from product, data and other teams from our Product and Experience and Technology (PXT) organization, as well as customer-facing businesses from Chase’s consumer bank, to help us find the right solution.

2. Understanding the whole experience: Beyond designing new features that help solve a customer pain point, we also want to ensure we’re providing the best overall multichannel experience. This means looking at the customer experience holistically — not just at visible experiences like the mobile app, web or branch — to ensure there are no gaps. We employ Service Design Blueprints to understand how less-visible factors, like how back-end systems, call center policies and scripts, and more may be impacting the customer experience.

We’ve seen success in formalizing other processes and problem-solving approaches, like our “Customer Why Template,” which was an early tool in our discovery processes. We are now creating a more standardized practice for discovery which will help create consistency across the organization. Some of the key objectives are:

1. Create a common understanding around what discovery means
2. Establish timelines for how long discovery should take to complete
3. Increase confidence in a design/product solution on the path to execution
4. Mitigate risk 

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