Principal Asset Management, formerly Principal Global Investors, is the institutional investment arm of Principal Financial. In conjunction with this rebranding, Principal was looking for a complete reboot and reimagining of their web presence to offer an experience more on part with competitors such as JP Morgan and Blockrock. The amount of custom work, the complexity of the data, and significant regulatory requirements all combined to make this a massive and massively challenging project.

The process began early in 2021 with discovery and research. I joined the project several months in as it transitioned to strategy and eventually to design. During the strategy phase, the team mapped out a six-level information architecture hierarchy that encompassed every future page on the site and created a foundation that I used to determine which templates we would design and develop to completely support the client's needs.

‍
At the point when the homepage design was complete, we were able to begin spinning up development. We would be performing development as a co-dev team, with the team led by a Wunderman-Thompson developer along with a front-end and back-end executing agency dev; the remainder of the team was to be provided by the client. This was the most complex portion of the project to manage because I was helping teams maintain velocity on five separate workstreams: wireframes, visual design, business analysis/requirements/spec writing, and development.

‍

To maintain efficiency within the team, I broke standups into short workstream-specific standups on a daily basis, then brought the teams together for a full standup each week. We also did many sprint ceremonies as a full large team, including retros. Even still, it was a significant challenge to encourage and create cross-team collaboration; I began to structure the collaboration through prescribed meetings in order to mitigate surprise and doubt from developers who would otherwise inherit designs downstream, sight unseen.

‍

A particular challenge with a site this large is that it is incredibly challenging to properly estimate such a complex site development effort before designs were even created. Our BAs worked tirelessly to document which modules are needed where and what types of content they would need to hold. Multiple developers worked through this tree of requirements to come up with estimates, but their confidence level remained low.

‍

Another challenge that we ran into was integrating developers from the agency and the brand. With different cultures, different workflows, and different ideas of how the site development should work, the merger was at times messy. At times, development velocity was significantly slower than we hoped, and it was a delicate balance to encourage team members to work faster without making them feel targeted or called out.

‍

As development began on the first template, the homepage, there were some unforeseen challenges with developing the design and it took a sprint and a half longer than planned to complete. This caused some concern with the client and the project team around our ability to complete the work on time. By this point, design was about 75% of the way complete, so we had a much better idea of the holistic brand and many of the modules that would need to be developed. It was an ideal time to take stock in our current progress and perform a complete re-estimate. We found that we would need about a month longer than we previously expected to finish the project, which felt great because some of the team was concerned we were four months behind schedule. The client shifted media spend on the new site by three months in order to provide extra cushion.

‍

The client asked for status updates and reports from a high level, but these proved challenging to provide both because of our difficulties and communication challenges of in learning to work in a co-development environment and because the nature of scrum as a short-to-medium term methodology contrasted with the client's view of the project from a more long-term waterfall lens. I came away from this project with many ideas of how to integrate scrum and waterfall to better complement each other, giving developers a short-term horizon of specific sprint goals that they tend to like, balanced with the bigger picture track to completion that the client wanted to see.

Design eventually wrapped up and development continued. The site included complex integrations with a search provider as well as a Principal-internal data feed for each product. As you may be able to imagine, there were a lot of areas for QA to test. As it turned out, development wrapped up ahead of our newly estimated schedule, but the client was thankful for the extra time nonetheless as their auditors spent an inordinate amount of time making sure that each piece of data was displaying accurately. I transitioned our development team from a sprint-based scrum methodology into a kanban methodology, which allowed us to scrap some formalities that were helpful during the initial build but were now adding an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy to the workflow. Kanban allowed us to be more responsive to the client's needs and push tickets through the development cycle in an average of 2.24 working days per ticket.

‍

As we closed in on the release, the client's priorities shifted from launch-critical errors that could be as serious as jail time if the SEC were to notice to small aesthetic updates such as button shapes. Project team and client team were taking a collective sigh of relief.

‍

With a budget total of around $7 million, this is the largest project I have ever managed. It didn't come without its challenges, but with a project this large it's virtually impossible for everything to go perfectly according to estimates and plans. As the project wrapped up, it ultimately came in under budget and with a product that the client was so excited about, our stakeholders referred the agency multiple times.

‍

I learned a lot during this project. I found that while developers might live by agile frameworks like scrum, designers and certainly clients do not. It is essential to customize work sequences and processes in a way that meets all stakeholders where they're at. I found a hybrid process that worked for the Principal team. I was also reminded of the importance of culture on a team towards building success through collaboration and teamwork with external teams and individuals that might have less experience working together. Ultimately, I helped to manage a team that delivered an amazing website to a very satisfied client.