Toyota Financial Services

Mobile App North Star

North star vision and end-to-end product experience redesign for lease end journey. 

Role

Product Design Lead

Core Team

1 Engagement Lead

1 Part-time Creative Director

My Impact

  • Benchmarking & competitive research

  • Concept exploration & prototyping

  • UI/UX, interaction design, and user flows

  • Stakeholder presentation & workshop facilitation

  • Video production for demo deliverable

Timeline

6 Weeks

Toyota Financial Services had spent years discussing improvements to the lease end experience but remained stuck in piecemeal execution, limited by feasibility concerns and fragmented stakeholder alignment.

Goal

The goal was to design a North Star vision to unite internal teams, anchor strategic conversations, and give TFS. a clear roadmap forward.

My Role

I served as product design lead, owning north star vision, concept development, UX design, along with stakeholder alignment.

Discovery & Research

I led design exploration and benchmarking, pulling in seamless UX experiences across industries to spark inspiration for innovation.

Through current-state analysis, we also identified that TFS's linear lease end journey ended the customer relationship when it should have been part of a continuous connection.

Today's lease end journey is linear and engagement diminishes after the car is returned or replaced.

In the future, customers will expect a more continuous relationship with TFS.

I co-created a North Star vision and three design principles to transform lease end into a rewarding experience for TFS customers.

Vision Statement

Experience Principles

Concept Development

With the strategic foundation established, we developed three catalytic opportunities as our framework and created 14 lease end concepts aligned to them.

I developed the concepts internally through iterative refinement, then validated and deepened them by leading a generative workshop with TFS stakeholders.

These concepts fundamentally reimagined the lease end experience.

Feature Spotlight

The centerpiece was the lease end decision side-by-side comparison view that functioned as a launchpad where users could compare all options and directly initiate their replacement, return, or purchase.

Inspired by product comparison views, I designed this feature to help customers compare all lease-end options side-by-side and explore real replacement vehicles from local dealer inventory.

I wireframed different iterations to ensure that all three lease end options were immediately visible, providing users with a clear picture of their choices upfront.

Learnings

  • One lesson learned was the importance of navigating organizational complexity quickly and upfront. Our team had to rapidly understand who needed to be kept in the loop and why to ensure we brought all necessary stakeholders along the journey.

    ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป In large organizations, early stakeholder mapping isn't just helpful, it's essential to maintaining momentum and avoiding roadblocks later.

  • Due to scoping constraints, we couldn't conduct dealer or end-user interviews during the project. Without human-centered research, I couldn't validate key assumptions like whether customers would actually feel comfortable with the app tracking their mileage for lease health monitoring. I tried my best to substitute this gap by diving into Reddit, app store reviews, and other secondary sources, but it wasn't the same.

    ๐Ÿ” Design decisions made without user validation always carry more risk, no matter how well-reasoned.

  • The trickiest challenge was balancing user-centered design with dealer considerations. TFS deeply valued their dealership relationships, so our team had to be thoughtful about how we framed features to avoid making dealers feel threatened or sidelined. I learned to position innovations as lead generation opportunities for dealers while keeping our North Star on improving the customer experience.

    ๐Ÿ’ฌ Advocating for users sometimes means framing their needs in terms that align with business realities.

Impact

Our concepts were brought to select Toyota dealerships in New York for dealer review and are currently in the piloting process.

The work transformed years of fragmented discussions into tangible features moving toward implementation, demonstrating how interactive prototypes can serve as powerful alignment tools that accelerate decision-making and build organizational momentum.

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