My Team | Paula Aguirre Gomez

Role-based Team Updates

My Team | Suncentral | Sun Life Financial

Role: Senior UX Lead & Sole UX Designer

Scope: 0→1 Product Design | Digital Transformation | Permission-Based UX

I designed Sun Life’s first-ever self-serve team management experience from the ground up. As the sole UX lead, I transformed a manual, help-desk-dependent process into a sophisticated, role-based digital hub, allowing advisors to manage complex delegated access and team responsibilities in real-time.

Orchestrating Sun Life’s first self-serve, role-based team ecosystem

Before the "My Team" initiative, managing team permissions and delegated access at Sun Life was a manual, legacy-bound process. Advisors and staff had to call the help desk to request updates, a friction-heavy workflow that could take days to process. This reliance on human intervention slowed down operations and created significant administrative overhead for the organization.

As the UX Lead, I faced three critical enterprise challenges:

The Transformation of Manual Workflows: The primary goal was to digitize a high-touch, help-desk-dependent process. This required translating complex business rules into an intuitive, self-serve interface that felt reliable and secure for all users.
Architectural Complexity (Role-Based Logic): This was Sun Life’s first role-based experience. I had to design three distinct, interconnected flows for Advisors, Assistants, and Back-Office staff. The challenge lay in managing the "intertwined" nature of these roles, ensuring that an action taken by one user accurately triggered the correct notifications and access updates for the rest of the team.
Designing for Accuracy and Trust: Because "My Team" handles sensitive delegated access, there was no room for user error. The interface needed to provide absolute clarity on responsibilities and permissions, ensuring users felt confident managing their team without professional support.

The Goal: My objective was to lead the 0→1 design of a comprehensive team management hub. By replacing a multi-day manual process with a real-time, role-specific digital solution, I aimed to empower advisors to manage their own team structures independently, significantly reducing support costs and improving organizational agility.

Designing Sun Life’s first company-wide role-based, self-serve team experience

The My Team feature was created from the ground up (0 → 1) to support organizational workflows for Sun Life advisors. As the first role-based experience at the company, it empowers users to access, manage, and engage with their team and related information in a self-serve way, reducing reliance on support and improving efficiency. The design also establishes a reusable pattern for collaboration-focused tools across the platform.

Key Outcomes

Introduced a company-first, advisor-centric role-based experience
- Designed a 0 → 1 feature that provides advisors with clear visibility into their team structure and role-specific actions.
Enabled self-serve workflows
- Users can access team information and take action independently, which reduced the number of calls to the Help Center.
Streamlined internal collaboration and task focus
- Clear information hierarchy allows advisors to quickly understand responsibilities and team structure.
Established a scalable pattern for future collaborative experiences
- The interaction model was designed to be reused across other role-based or collaboration features within Sun Life.

Design Impact

This work transforms team management from a support-heavy process into a self-serve, actionable hub:

Supports role-specific access to team data
Reduces friction and reliance on internal support
Improves enterprise usability for advisors
Sets a company-wide precedent for role-based experiences

Learnings & Reflection

Designing My Team highlighted the value of company-wide role-based, self-serve experiences in large enterprise systems:

Tailoring experiences to user roles reduces support load and improves adoption
Centralizing team data creates efficiency without adding complexity
Scalable patterns allow future extensions without rework
Innovating at the company level requires balancing user needs, technical feasibility, and organizational alignment

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Discovery & alignment

Aligned with stakeholders to understand the goals for introducing role-based team updates and how this would improve communication across different users.

Reviewed the existing approach to team updates to understand how information was currently structured and delivered across the organization.

Personas

Defined three core personas (Advisors, Assistants, and Back-office users) each with distinct responsibilities, tasks, and permissions.

These personas established the foundation for the role-based structure by clarifying how different user groups interact with team updates and what information is relevant to each role.

Defining role-based structure

Explored how team updates could be structured based on user roles to ensure information was tailored and relevant.

Focused on mapping what each role needed to see and how updates could adapt accordingly.

Key decisions centered on defining a system that could support multiple roles while maintaining clarity and consistency.

Design system

Worked within the existing design system, adapting and aligning components to support a structured role-based experience.

Ensured consistency across the experience while accommodating different information needs per role.

Design & iteration

Created high-fidelity designs to explore how role-based updates would be presented across different user roles.

Iterated on structure and layout to improve clarity and ensure information was easy to scan and understand depending on role context.

Engineering collaboration

Worked closely with the lead engineer to understand backend flows, data structure, and system constraints.

This collaboration was key in translating backend logic into a coherent front-end experience that could properly support role-based content delivery.

Maintained continuous alignment to ensure the system worked seamlessly across both technical implementation and user experience.

User testing & demo (new experience validation)

Conducted user testing sessions and demos to validate the experience, as this was a completely new self-service and real-time updates capability within the company.

These sessions were critical in demonstrating how users would interact with role-based updates in real time and validating that the system was understandable and usable in practice.

Given the novelty of the experience, the demo also played a key role in aligning stakeholders and validating the direction of the solution.

Stakeholder presentation

Presented the proposed solution to business and engineering teams.

The direction was quickly understood and aligned across teams, supporting agreement on how the role-based update system would be implemented.

Collaboration & iteration

Worked closely with product and engineering teams throughout the process to refine and align the experience.

Maintained ongoing feedback loops to ensure consistency between system logic and front-end execution.

Personas

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Role-based Team Updates

My Team | Suncentral | Sun Life Financial

Orchestrating Sun Life’s first self-serve, role-based team ecosystem

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