Context
Allianz Trade is a global leader in trade credit insurance and risk management.
The company is part of the Allianz Group, and I joined at a key moment of transformation: the redesign of Allianz Trade Online, their SaaS platform used by over 20,000 active users each month.
I entered this mission in a special context: contributing to a large-scale rebranding effort while working inside the Customer Experience team.
It was an intense and rewarding period but I’m grateful, because it was also the first time I truly stepped into a leadership role.
My missions as UX/UI Designer included:
Leading UX initiatives through user research (interviews, shadowing, card sorting, personas, CJM)
Designing multi-device interfaces (desktop, tablet, mobile) from wireframes to interactive prototypes and final mockups
Facilitating design sprints and co-creation workshops with product, marketing, sales, and tech teams
Contributing to Allianz’s Design System, ensuring consistency and scalability across digital products
Mentoring junior designers and helping define the UX strategy while spreading a user-centered culture inside the company
Within the CX unit, my role was a critical link in ensuring coherence across multiple teams, while balancing business goals and user needs
Audit
Allianz Trade Online is a fast-paced and ever-evolving environment where adaptability is key.
Each week brought new challenges and objectives. My role was to support several product teams while keeping a transversal vision to ensure a consistent user experience across the platform.
From the start, I introduced bottom-up team KPIs to differentiate UX performance measurement from top-down business KPIs. The goal was to track the quality of our deliverables and maintain a strong delivery pace in a constantly changing context.
Together with the teams, we co-created a Mood Radar Chart, a collaborative tool measuring balance between work accomplishment, mental energy, and confidence in the future. It quickly became a discussion support in 1:1s and a foundation for analyzing our quarterly evolution.
In parallel, we defined 4 strategic workstreams:
Creation of a Global Usability Score using an adapted AttrakDiff survey
Implementation of persona-based surveys to identify improvement areas
Development of a unified workshop system in Figjam to accelerate stakeholder autonomy
Tracking the evolution of team and customer experience over time
Active contribution to the Allianz Design System, ensuring ergonomic and visual consistency across digital products
This approach allowed me not only to improve the coherence and value of Allianz’s products but also to strengthen the design culture and team satisfaction within the company.
Conclusion
This mission at Allianz Trade Online was some of the most intense I’ve ever experienced in a company!
The pace was fast, the challenges constant, and it truly felt like a full year compressed into half the time — in the best possible way.
I had the chance to collaborate with incredibly talented and human professionals — if you’re reading this, thank you! During this mission, I strengthened my leadership in a dense and complex environment, pushed my adaptability to the next level, and managed to overcome most of the obstacles I encountered. Allianz definitely made me grow stronger as a designer and as a leader, and I now know I will thrive in future leadership roles.
Unfortunately, with the company’s rebranding came budget shifts and a reorganization of priorities. This new hierarchy also brought a different mindset, and not all of us were aligned with the new direction. As I told my team, I could have happily stayed much longer if things hadn’t changed so quickly.
