Prudential Stages
Overview
Prudential had no direct-to-consumer digital retirement experience. I joined as founding Creative Director before a single line of production code existed, and led the creation of two AI-powered products from concept to launch: Stages for Retirement — a web-based retirement planning platform — and LIV, a standalone mobile experience using generative AI to help users envision their dream retirement. Within three months of launch, Stages surpassed its year-one AUM target. At maturity, the platform was driving nearly 500,000 unique annual visitors at a 6% prospect conversion rate above financial services industry benchmarks. LIV, launched in Q4 2023, established Prudential as one of the first consumer financial brands to ship a generative AI product.
The Business Context
Prudential's retirement business was built on advisor relationships and paper-based planning. As the financial services landscape shifted toward direct digital engagement, a critical gap emerged: millions of Americans were thinking about retirement but had no Prudential-owned digital experience to meet them. The brand had no front door.
The mandate was to build one — not a brochure, not a microsite, but a full intelligent product capable of assessing retirement readiness, returning personalized guidance, and converting visitors into qualified prospects at scale. The additional challenge: building it from zero, inside a regulated financial services environment, with a team that had to grow as fast as the product.
My Leadership Scope
I joined at Alpha — before the product had a name, a visual language, or a single user. I built and led a team of seven spanning UX, product design, brand, marketing, creative technology, copywriting, and research — scaled from an initial two-person core. I owned creative direction and UX strategy end-to-end across both products.
My cross-functional mandate extended across Legal (navigating compliance and regulatory language requirements), Marketing ($25M in paid media at launch was built around the experience I designed), Paid Media, Engineering, and Data Science. I also served as the sole visionary behind LIV — conceiving the product from nothing, defining its brand identity, and leading its designers and engineers from ideation to launch.
The Evolution of Stages
Alpha — Proving the Concept
The first phase focused on a single question: would a digital retirement planning experience convert at scale? We built rapid prototyping cycles with a lean team, establishing the foundational interaction model — a multi-step onboarding flow collecting financial profile data and returning a personalized Confidence Score, powered by OpenAI ML. Every design decision was tested against conversion, not aesthetics.
The call I made at Alpha exit: Commit to a full product, not a marketing microsite. The data supported it. We moved.
Beta — Building for Scale
Beta expanded both the team and the scope. We integrated into Prudential's Enterprise Design System while preserving Stages' own product identity. We introduced advisor scheduling (TimeTrade) as a direct CTA at four key points in the onboarding flow — creating a measurable digital-to-human handoff that connected users to Prudential's advisor network. We ran three documented iterations of the onboarding flow, each improving completion.
The call I made at Beta exit: Prioritize the onboarding completion rate above all other metrics before launch. A product that loses users midway through doesn't convert. The final completion rate at launch: 31.6% — nearly 1 in 3 registered users finishing a 12-step financial planning flow.
MVP — Launching with Confidence
By MVP, the product was ready for $25M in paid media behind it. The launch validated the bet. Within three months, Stages surpassed its year-one AUM target — the primary business KPI — a milestone that had been set as a 12-month goal. The experience I designed was the conversion engine for one of Prudential's largest consumer digital investments.
AI Leadership
LIV — AI-Powered Retirement Helper
In Q4 2023, My team and I conceived and launched LIV: an AI-powered retirement helper built as a standalone mobile experience, with the Retirement Location Planner as its flagship feature. Rather than asking users about their portfolio, LIV asked about their life. Users answered conversational questions about where they wanted to live and what mattered to them day-to-day — proximity to nature, cultural institutions, medical facilities, lifestyle priorities. OpenAI analyzed those inputs and generated personalized retirement location recommendations tailored to each user's specific answers.
The experience was personal by design. It addressed users by name, used an intuitive preference-selection interface to surface what mattered most, and asked the kinds of lifestyle questions financial planning tools have always ignored. The AI didn't return a number — it returned a direction.
LIV was conceived as the foundation of a broader "LIV your retirement" brand platform — a full AI-powered retirement life design experience planned to expand well beyond location planning. The Retirement Location Planner was the first module to ship. The broader vision was cut short when the Stages platform was sunset in February 2025, but what launched was real: a shipped AI product in a regulated financial services environment, with its own visual identity, dedicated marketing budget, and live users.
It was built with a deliberately warm, illustrative visual language — distinct from Prudential's institutional tone — and funneled users directly into the Stages platform, creating an AI-powered acquisition loop from retirement aspiration to financial planning action.
Most companies put AI on their roadmap.
We shipped it.
Stages for Retirement was built on an OpenAI ML backbone from Alpha — analyzing financial data, generating retirement projections, and powering the personalized Confidence Score at the end of onboarding. But the AI story didn't end at the platform.
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Tool: OpenAI
Application: Retirement projections, financial analysis, Confidence Score, LIV backbone -
Tool: DALL-E
Application: AI-generated retirement visuals in the LIV UI -
Tool: MS Copilot
Application: Engineering acceleration across the build -
Tool: MS Copilot, ChatGPT
Application: Design synthesis, Copywriting, brainstorm generations -
Tool: Miro AI
Application: Rapid ideations and stakeholder facilitation
Key Workstreams
01 — Stages for Retirement
Prudential's first owned direct-to-consumer retirement planning platform. A multi-step onboarding experience that collected financial profile data, assessed retirement readiness, and returned a personalized Confidence Score via OpenAI ML. Integrated advisor scheduling at four touchpoints, creating a direct digital-to-human conversion path.
02 — LIV: AI-Powered Retirement Helper
An AI-powered mobile product I conceived from scratch, built around a core insight: retirement planning starts with life design, not spreadsheets. The Retirement Location Planner — LIV's flagship feature — used OpenAI to analyze users' lifestyle priorities and generate personalized retirement location recommendations. Launched Q4 2023 with its own visual identity and marketing budget, funneling directly into Stages. One of the first shipped generative AI products in consumer financial services.
03 — Enterprise Design System
Built the component library and design standards that governed visual consistency across both Stages and LIV — ensuring both products lived within Prudential's brand ecosystem while maintaining distinct product identities. Scalable architecture for a multi-product suite.
04 — Paid Media & Brand Strategy
Developed the "We get it. We got you." brand platform — the creative and messaging foundation for Stages, selected from an intensive tagline ideation process and reviewed through Legal. The experience I designed was the primary conversion destination for $25M in paid media at launch and an estimated $50M in year two.
Impacts & Outcomes
Year-one AUM target hit in the first quarter post-launch — 4× ahead of plan. The primary business KPI that validated the entire product investment.
$1M AUM in 3 Months
489,438 unique visitors in a 10-month window (Jan–Oct 2023 alone), backed by $25M in paid media, with 86% of traffic driven by Stages-specific campaigns.
~500K Annual Visitors
Visitor-to-qualified-prospect conversion rate — above financial services industry benchmark. 29,535 digital prospects registered in 10 months.
6% Prospect Conversion
Nearly 1 in 3 registered users completed a 12-step financial planning flow — the result of three iterative redesigns of the onboarding experience before and after launch.
31.6% Onboarding Completion
6,881 advisor scheduling interactions in 10 months — the digital-to-human handoff working as designed
~2 million page views in 10 months
LIV launched Q4 2023 — one of the first consumer-facing generative AI products in financial services
3 documented onboarding redesigns with measurable improvement at each iteration
Enterprise B2B channel established: employer Financial Wellness clients including Cigna and others
Additional outcomes worth noting:
Methodology
Test and learn
Every phase of Stages was built on a hypothesis-driven design cycle. We tested onboarding flows, CTA placements, and registration page structures with real users before scaling - then documented and acted on what the data showed. Three major onboarding redesigns between launch and Q4 2023 each produced measurable improvements in completion rate.
AI Accelerated Design
Microsoft Copilot accelerated development and compressed design synthesis timelines. MIRO AI powered our workshop and ideation sessions.
AI wasn't layered on top of our process,it was part of the methodology from day one.
Agile Iteration
Working in agile sprints across a cross-functional team of designers, engineers, UX writers, and marketing partners, we moved from Alpha to MVP launch in under two years while navigating legal review, compliance requirements, and a $25M paid media launch timeline.
Paid Media & Marketing
Awards
US CXA '23 - Bronze - Customers at the heart of everything
US CXA '23 - Gold - Best CX in Financial Services
US CXA '23 - Gold - CX Team of the year
US CXA '23 - Silver - Best Digital Transformation
2023 Bronze Stevie Award
2023 Gold Stevie Award