Citi Ventures — A Design-Driven Approach to Innovation

Citi Ventures is a department of Citibank in charge of accelerating innovation and experimentation of new products and services for its teams and customers. Citi Ventures engaged Code & Theory for over 2 years to explore, craft and test a large series of innovative mobile services, based on a native mobile design environment, in order to inform short and long-term plan for customers mobile apps.

Code and Theory was tasked with injecting new thinking and process into the Citi incubator program to facilitate stronger ideation and validate hypothesis based on qualitative user research and rapid prototyping. Through a customized Design Thinking process, the innovation program not only scaled over two years, but generated insights and provided larger value to the bank consumer strategy.

Our team has conducted extensive research – from initial consumer behaviors and market trends, to quantitative and qualitative problem validation, and to concept testing through in person and remote 1:1 interviews (with prototypes). The extent of this research has generated invaluable insights around user needs and habits for digital banking at large.

By auditing our research and presenting monthly learnings to internal staff, Code and Theory identified knowledge gaps and opportunities within the portfolio, from tactical to north-star.

Code and Theory created a bespoke approach to Design Thinking for Citi Ventures to identify and prioritize user problems and workshop non-traditional solutions with stakeholders. With Citi Ventures, our team designed and tested over 50 different POCs for digital products.

My role: research & user testing, ideation & concept development, product strategy, UX design on over 5 workstreams.

Engagement lead: M. Mingasson, J. Zimmerman. 2017-2019.

If you’re interested in seeing intermediary deliverables and additional process / approach documentation, feel free to get in touch :)