Empowering Singaporeans to plan for retirement
PLAN WITH CPF
Jan 2025 - present
I inserted myself into an environment where design was not on the organisation chart, and shifted product direction by creating safe spaces for competing voices.
Company
Central Provident Fund Board
Role
Sole product designer
Contribution
Cross-functional communication, Design governance, Design ops, Facilitation, Product design, Product strategy, Project management, Prototyping, Research
Team
1 product designer (unofficially), 9 product owners, 5 developers
Background
To foster closer collaboration between technology and operations, CPF Board established a cross-functional pilot product team. The team's objective was to conceptualise, build, and maintain a sustainable backlog for a product called PLAN with CPF (PLAN), with a broad North Star to empower Singaporeans to make financial planning decisions for retirement. Design was not a formally part of this set up.
A three-fold challenge
I was tasked to embed design into the team's processes, to integrate user practices and principles. 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, roadmaps naturally prioritised policy, meaning cohesive user journeys 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 institutional approvals, which created delivery friction and made rapid, agile iteration a challenge.
Strategy
I tapped on skills beyond traditional design to facilitate process and advocate design craft. The success of these were contingent on two things:
Utilising storytelling to help the team connect the dots between intended features and actual value they bring to members' lives
Positioning design as a problem-solving tool who could help the team overcome hurdles — by utilising design principles and artefacts to map out, structure, and present their thoughts clearly.
Process facilitation: Aligning the team and managing velocity
This track focuses on the operational and people skills used to manage our split workload and create space for user-centric practices.
Informing the roadmap through collaborative workshops
PLAN's vision was broad, which made roadmapping a challenge. To address this, I facilitated a strategic workshop alongside two other designers to guide the cross-functional team through a long-term forecasting exercise.
We asked participants to imagine what a citizen would truly appreciate having decades down the road, and then translated those aspirations into user-benefit statements. Once organised, we introduced a framework to help the team weigh these benefits against upcoming business objectives and technical considerations.
Facilitating the workshop with 16 participants across PLAN and its sister team.
Mapping user-benefit statements to establish a prioritisation framework, where each column represented a targeted feature cluster and each row anchors directly back to a strategic keyword within the product vision.
The goal was to establish a hierarchy: once there was consensus on the core user benefits, features could be prioritised based on how effectively they deliver value within the product's primary focus areas. By mapping these user-benefit rows directly back into an overarching vision — adapted for the purposes of this exercise — the team could have a reliable mechanism to guide future ideation and objectively determine which features to onboard.
Mapping out potential focus areas for the product by considering financial adequacy levels and government-remit boundaries.
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 sustainably, I collaborated with the business to identify lower-impact user journeys. I initially guided them by showing examples of how to analyse and articulate UX trade-offs. After a while, the team was able to handle these design-related decisions independently, but strictly for the pre-identified, lower-impact flows.
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
This track focuses on the design craft and user research used to pivot the actual product direction.
From a judgemental checklist, to a neutral canvas
One of the team's initial goals was to build a centralised landing page that connected members 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 was 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 members 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 member to update a plan after a few years. This framework empowered members 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 members 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 members 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 members 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 members.
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 for members. 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 members 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.
While this proposal has not yet launched and final screens are unavailable, this concept passed senior leadership reviews with unanimous approval when findings were presented.
Conceptual wireframe of the Hub, designed to give contextual meaning to financial figures before members proceed to individual modules
Outcome
By the end of 2025, unique users across the entire suite of CPF planning tools grew by 28%, demonstrating that the product successfully reached a segment of Singaporeans who had not interacted with these services. Furthermore, the products achieved strong stickiness, with 68% of PLAN users recorded as returning users in 2025.
Beyond launch metrics, research shed light on how members wish to interact with the Board when it comes to financial planning, and also defined 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 cross-functional workflow. By acting as a safe space, I helped colleagues untangle messy, unformed thoughts and guided them to articulate the core principles behind their ideas. This collaborative coaching equipped the team to evaluate features objectively and gave them the rationale needed to push back on external directives that did not align with the product's core focus.
Takeaways
True 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 give an unguided team the tools to visualise and stand by their own strategy. Anyone can build screens — even AI — but it takes true craft to build understanding.