The situation
I joined Aflac in January 2025 — and one month in, the Director who hired me left for another role. The Digital Experience team had 17 designers and researchers across two managers, and someone needed to keep things moving while the organization searched for a replacement. That responsibility landed on me while I was still learning my own role as Senior Manager.
I was directly leading 7 people, including the Design Manager and Research Manager who led their own teams. But the accountability for the broader org's stability landed on my desk as well.
Keeping the team stable
I absorbed it and kept going.
The hardest part wasn't any single decision — it was maintaining momentum across everything at once. I was still ramping into my Senior Manager scope. I was leading UX on a high-priority program. And I was keeping the broader team of 17 informed, supported, and delivering through an extended period of organizational uncertainty.
What I focused on was consistency. Keeping communication clear, keeping delivery moving, and making sure designers and researchers felt supported even when the structure around them was unsettled. When the new Director started, the team was intact, morale was stable, and no programs had fallen behind.
The interim period lasted five months. It wasn't sustainable — I was carrying two roles simultaneously while still finding my footing in one of them — but the new Director arrived before anything broke.
Leading the broker and agent initiative
The work I'm most invested in at Aflac is leading UX for a strategic growth initiative — a new product that enables brokers and agents to sell individual Aflac products bundled together in a group-like way.
The complexity is significant. The team is simultaneously filing for new insurance products across all 50 states and integrating multiple backend systems to make the product possible. The regulatory and technical constraints are real, and the design work has to account for both.
What's worked well is keeping design grounded in frequent contact with the people who will actually use it. We've run multiple sessions with brokers and agents and have more planned before open enrollment planning begins in August — a hard deadline that shapes our entire research calendar.
The findings have been worth it. Things the team assumed brokers and agents would know — abbreviations, how Aflac refers to its own products, terminology that's second nature internally — weren't clear to the people using the system. Those gaps wouldn't have surfaced without getting designs in front of real users early. Catching them now is significantly cheaper than catching them after build.
That cadence has earned genuine cross-functional trust. The broader program team actively pushes for user testing rather than treating it as something UX does separately from the real work.
Driving AI adoption
After the new Director came on board, one of my clearest contributions has been leading the adoption of an AI-augmented prototyping tool across the full team of 17 designers and researchers.
I partnered with the vendor to run an initial training session for the broader team, not as a mandated rollout but as an opportunity for people to see what the tool could do and explore it on their own terms. I encouraged experimentation without pressure to produce anything specific right away.
A few months later, once the team had built real familiarity, I brought the vendor back for a more advanced session focused on using design tokens more efficiently. By that point people were already finding their own ways into the tool — designers using it for rapid concept generation, researchers using it to build lightweight prototypes for testing. The second session helped everyone get more out of what they'd already started doing.
The result was a 90% reduction in designer prototype production time. More importantly the speed changed how the team worked — concepts get in front of the business and users faster, iteration cycles are shorter, and the team builds with more confidence.
What I learned
Leading through a vacancy — while still learning your own role — is a particular kind of pressure. You don't have the authority of a title, you don't have the established relationships a Director would have, and you're doing it all while trying to get your own footing. What carries you through is consistency: showing up the same way every day, keeping your commitments, and making sure the people around you feel steady even when you're not sure you are.
Driving tool adoption without mandating it was a deliberate choice. Telling people they had to use a new tool would have generated resistance. Showing them what it could do and giving them space to explore generated excitement. People across the team found their own distinct ways into it — that wouldn't have happened with a top-down rollout.
And the broker and agent initiative keeps reinforcing something I come back to constantly: frequent contact with real users makes everything easier. Even when a team knows a domain well, there are always assumptions baked into the design that only a real user can surface. The abbreviations and terminology gaps we found weren't failures of the team's knowledge — they were the natural result of being too close to the product. Getting out of the building fixes that.