Matteo Remondini

I joined the Taxfix team right at the peak of the tax season, when most individuals file their yearly submissions. The product could already count on a solid base of satisfied customers, and the team relied on a number of specific assumptions aimed at meeting ambitious growth targets for revenues and market share. My initial focus was to validate a new service offering with potential users before launching, and to support the design team enhancing the user experience of the product.

Over the course of the first few months, however, the team was met with several unforeseen external and internal challenges. These obstacles had the potential to adversely impact the Italian product and, as a result, the entire business.

In order to mitigate the potential risk, I switched my focus towards providing strategic guidance to product stakeholders, while leading improvements to work practices and mentoring less experienced colleagues. This included co-designing a vision and roadmap of initiatives, defining and running product experiments, and bringing people together across different areas of the business and helped the team getting back in shape for the following tax season.

In 2021, the global retail bank had a remarkable opportunity to showcase their industry-leading sustainability strategy at the pivotal COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. However, they faced the challenging task of not only bringing together all of their ambitious sustainability efforts but also presenting them in a captivating and cohesive format that would truly resonate with the conference audience.

Collaborating with a tight-knit team of seasoned senior design strategists, I worked around the clock to craft a winning solution for the bank. We delved deep into the intricacies of their business, interviewing top-level management and conducting a series of dynamic ideation workshops to fuel our creativity.

After a rigorous ideation process and a review of secondary and desk-based research, we unveiled a revolutionary set of behavior-change-based initiatives that revolved around the brilliant concept of "home as the fulcrum for sustainable change." These initiatives were designed to encompass different areas of customers' lives, empowering them to lead more sustainable lifestyles on a day-to-day basis.

Despite the very limited time available to unravel the challenge, the final result managed to showcase the bank's unwavering commitment to sustainability, and our team’s ability to help them bring their vision to life with creativity and ingenuity.

The Department for Work and Pensions is tasked with addressing a plethora of intricate and multifaceted challenges that British citizens face on a regular basis. These challenges are often intertwined and layered, requiring a comprehensive and nuanced approach to effectively tackle them. Unfortunately, policymakers frequently lack the necessary resources, time, and freedom to develop original, impartial, and comprehensive solutions to these challenges.

To help overcome these obstacles, our team played a crucial role in establishing a dedicated Innovation Lab, designed to experiment with new and innovative methods of addressing these challenges, and finding novel ways to better serve the citizens of tomorrow. Over the course of several months, the Innovation Lab took on a diverse range of complex and interrelated challenges. These challenges included tackling the consequences of an ageing population and its impact on unemployment rates and addressing issues related to health and safety in the workplace.

Alongside a strong team of multidisciplinary experts, ranging from machine learning engineers to innovation directors, I leveraged Service Design to facilitate alignment among the various civil servant stakeholders. Through this approach, I was able to create a shared understanding of the goals, strategies, and potential implications of a high-profile project.

This was instrumental in establishing the Innovation Lab as a trusted and reliable partner for the department in tackling complex and interconnected societal challenges.