The Grow Savings storyboarding series

A 5-phase method for getting from research to a designable story

Storyboarding usually shows up as a one-off workshop: everybody sketches for 90 minutes, the stickies go in a folder, and the team goes back to designing screens. I wanted the opposite—a sequence where each session consumed the last one's output, so that by the end we had one artifact instead of 5 afternoons.

The long-term goal was a cohesive end-to-end narrative for the savings experience, plus a set of principles for each part of it. The short-term goal was narrower and more useful: storyboard real member journeys until we could see where people most needed help growing their wealth, and what that meant for the product.

Each session ate the one before it

I ran these biweekly with our product designers and PM. The sequencing mattered more than any individual exercise: nothing was allowed to be organized until it had first been generated messily, and nothing was allowed to be designed until it had been organized.

1. Archetypes, then a backwards brainstorm

   10 minutes on who our members actually are—builders, stabilizers, maximizers—then 35 minutes working backwards from the end of a wealth journey. End goals first, then milestones, then the real-life and in-app pain points. Explicitly in no particular order. Organizing came later, and I said so out loud so nobody tried to be tidy too early.

2. Write a story, workshop it, rewrite it

   15 minutes drafting one person's journey toward growing their wealth. 15 minutes workshopping it as a group for whether it was thoughtful and empathetic. 10 minutes rewriting. The rule on the board was that it had to be real—we were not writing fiction, we were assembling what we actually knew about actual members.

3. Code the stories, then find themes

   I introduced a color-coded key and we marked up every story with it. Then we split into 2 groups—one sorting the coded writing into themes, the other sorting the stickies from the backwards brainstorm—so the same material got themed twice by different people.

4. Reconcile

   Both groups came back and explained how they'd grouped things, and we combined them. The disagreements were the interesting part: where 2 groups drew the boundary differently was usually where the product concept was still fuzzy.

5. One framework, one heat map, one narrative

   We built a single journey framework that held for every archetype, molded it into a heat map, and used it to identify where Credit Karma could genuinely differentiate rather than match. Then I drafted the narrative for design.

Because the way you storyboard is the way you design

If we write a member who isn't real, we'll design for a member who isn't real.

That was the rule I put on the board and repeated every session. It sounds like a facilitation slogan, but it was doing actual work: it gave anyone in the room permission to stop the exercise and ask where a detail came from. A story someone invented because it made the flow tidier is a story that produces a tidy, wrong design 3 months later.

The other bet was on sequencing over intensity. A single all-day workshop generates a lot of energy and very little that survives contact with the sprint. Spreading it across 5 sessions meant the team kept returning to the same material with fresh eyes, and each return produced a more compressed artifact than the last—stories, then codes, then themes, then a framework, then a narrative.

It became a method, and then it made the case for me

The immediate output was the thing we needed: one journey framework covering every archetype, a heat map showing where members struggled most, a clear read on where we could differentiate rather than match competitors, and a narrative the team designed against.

Then I ran the whole method again for a different member segment. That second run is the part I'd point at—a workshop that works once is a good afternoon; a workshop that works twice on different material is a method.

I shared the series with our PMs and with my design VP. Later, when the content design team was dissolved and I was moved onto the newly assembled ops team, he told me why he thought I'd fit: he'd seen the facilitation work, and the valuable part wasn't the storyboards. It was that I'd taken 12 weeks of ambiguity and organized it into something a team could act on.

He was right. Most of the work on this site comes from the same place—bridging content and strategy, and making the case for other people's work.