Establishing design in a new team to empower Singaporeans to build financial resilience
PLAN WITH CPF
Jan 2025 - present
I inserted myself into an environment where design was not on the organisation chart, built relations, and influenced product direction.
1
product designer
14
business and tech officers
~550k
unique users
80%
CSAT
Company
Central Provident Fund Board
Role
Sole product designer
Contribution
Cross-functional communication, design ops, facilitation, product design, product strategy, project management, prototyping, research
Team
1 product designer (unofficially), 9 product owners, 5 developers
Background
In 2025, CPF Board established a cross-functional pilot product team, whose objective was to conceptualise, build, and maintain a sustainable backlog for a citizen-facing product called PLAN with CPF (PLAN). Design was not a formal part of this set up.
A three-fold challenge
I was tasked to embed design into the team's processes. This presented a three-fold challenge:
Managing split allocation. I had to balance sprint commitments for an existing vertical design squad while simultaneously carving out mental bandwidth to navigate this pilot environment.
Navigating policy-driven roadmaps. Because product management was driven primarily by the business, the roadmap prioritised policy. User-centric perspectives oftentimes required deliberate advocacy to gain visibility.
Operating within evolving agile processes. While the pilot was designed to operate as an autonomous squad, the workflow still involved multi-tiered approvals, which created delivery friction and made rapid, agile iteration a challenge.
Strategy
My success was contingent on soft skills:
Storytelling
I helped the team connect the dots between intended features and actual value they bring to citizens' lives
Collaborative spirit
I positioned myself as a facilitator, reaching out to individuals and creating safe spaces for alternative voices. Utilising design thinking, I facilitated conversations which influenced product direction.
Process facilitation: Aligning the team and managing velocity
Informing the roadmap through collaborative workshops
One of the challenges of public sector products is a large user base, making roadmapping a challenge. I facilitated a strategic workshop alongside two other designers to guide the team through a long-term forecasting exercise. The workshop imagined what a citizen would appreciate having decades down the road, and why these were beneficial to them.
Facilitating the workshop with 16 participants across PLAN and its sister team.
Mapping user-benefit statements to establish a prioritisation framework. Each column represents a targeted feature cluster, and each row anchors back to a strategic keyword within the vision.
The goal was to establish hierarchy: once there was consensus on the core benefits, features could be prioritised based on how effectively they deliver value within the product's primary focus areas. By mapping these back into an overarching vision, the team could have a mechanism to guide future ideation and objectively determine which features to onboard.
Continually recalibrating design's focus due to compressed bandwidth
Because final alignment on user flows often took time, the window for design execution was compressed. To manage the workload, I collaborated with the team to identify lower-impact user journeys, and guided them by showing examples of how to analyse and articulate UX trade-offs. After a while, the team was able to handle these decisions independently.
This coaching approach kept overall product development moving efficiently, while successfully preserving my bandwidth for the core user experience.
An example of how I guided the business team to evaluate UI trade-offs, ensuring that product choices remained calculated despite compressed design bandwidth
Product execution: Shifting strategy to match mental models
From a judgemental checklist, to a neutral canvas
One of the team's initial goals was to build a centralised landing page that connected citizens to different topical planners across CPF. Early explorations leaned toward a checklist UI that tracked a user’s progress across different topics. This was based on the assumption that the product needed a "100% complete" state to be engaging — with the unspoken premise that being engaging would be what gives the product utility.
Some of the team's initial explorations for the dashboard, using a "100% complete" state
However, usability testing revealed psychological backlash. As people have different financial focuses, a rigid checklist penalised users for skipping areas which were not relevant to them or they didn't feel the need to do or didn't have interest in doing. One participant quipped:
You are rating me when I didn't ask for it, what gives you the right?
Instead of enforcing a single definition of completeness, the revised design simply presented the five core planning areas. The system assigned a status to each area to show whether it was actionable or not based on business rules, such as reminding a user to update a plan after a few years. This framework empowered citizens to decide which areas were important to them, without passing judgement on how well they had planned.
This centralised landing page was launched in July 2025 with the revised design. This launch marked PLAN's first go-to-market milestone, positioning all distinct CPF planning services as a unified, holistic suite for the very first time.
The implemented design presents the five planning areas, allowing citizens to decide how to act without enforcing completion.
Explorations for the individual status indicators — this was fun!
From a passive link directory, to a contextual storyteller
One of the team's largest endeavours for 2026 was to overhaul the retirement payout planning area. The legacy system used a long, straight-through flow that forced members to complete everything in one sitting. After receiving data calling for a less intimidating experience, the team embarked on a mission to modularise the service.
A comparison mapping the legacy straight-through flow against the proposed modular, non-linear architecture.
The initial thinking was to create a central "Hub" that comprised entry points into separate modules like Goal-setting and Payout projections, with insights that became available only if both were completed. Once a user entered any module, they would be encouraged to proceed to the next module instead of going back to the Hub. The intent was to give users an immediate, clear view of their potential shortfall so they could make timely decisions about their retirement. To evaluate this flow approach, I conducted one-on-one interviews with 8 citizens.
Observing a participant as she interacted with the prototype. (Photo taken and used with permission, masked for privacy.)
The data revealed that this flow was confusing to citizens. Because each module involved calculations, and used similar inputs that could be edited across modules, back-to-back calculations without context disoriented members. While those familiar with CPF policy were able to somewhat make sense of the numbers, those unfamiliar with policy became completely lost. In stark contrast, when brought back to the Hub towards the end of the session, almost all participants had a Eureka moment:
I didn't know what was going on. But this page is the most useful, at one glance I know already. This is the saving grace, I feel happier now.
Just now so many calculation, you ask me until I don't know where already. Now I finally can see, I know that this amount means this.
With this insight, the design was shifted to bring users back to the Hub after completing any individual module. Instead of just being a passive link directory, this revised Hub acted as a storyteller that drew clear connections between the data points and explained what each figure meant in relation to the others. By allowing the Hub to tell a cohesive story, research successfully pivoted the team toward a more user-centric architecture.
Conceptual wireframe of the Hub, designed to give contextual meaning to financial figures before users proceed to individual modules
Outcome
By the end of 2025, unique users across the entire suite of CPF planning tools grew by 28%, successfully reaching citizens who had not interacted with these services. Furthermore, we achieved a 68% returning user rate and a CSAT score of 80% in the same year.
My research also shed light on how members wish to interact with the Board when it comes to financial planning, and defining clear UX practices for any future Hub-and-module concepts within the organisation.
Finally, stepping into a structural void to facilitate the team's operational processes had a direct impact on our workflow. I helped colleagues untangle messy, unformed thoughts, and equipped the team to evaluate features objectively against the product's core focus.
The Straits Times: CPF members can make housing, retirement and health insurance plans with new digital platform
Takeaways
Product design in a complex organisation is about being confident enough to step into evolving operational environments, and utilising systemic perspectives to facilitate alignment when product directions are in tension with any desired outcomes.
Ultimately, my impact did not come from a formal title on an organisational chart. It came from the ability to navigate a split workload, build mutual trust across siloed departments, and guide a team to visualise and stand by their own strategy. Anyone can build screens — even AI — but it takes craft to build understanding.