allyz by Allianz

Following the acquisition of simplesurance by Allianz Partners in 2022, our design team was brought in to accelerate the allyz project. allyz is Allianz Partners' flagship B2C digital platform — a travel companion app aggregating services and insurance benefits across multiple lines of business, serving both European and US markets.

I led the design team throughout — responsible for design strategy, team building, design operations, stakeholder alignment, and delivery across two regional app versions. The mandate was speed. The condition for speed was infrastructure that did not yet exist.

The mandate was clear: go live on a fixed date. Everything else was not.

The app was designed to aggregate functions from multiple lines of business across two regions — EU and US — each with its own business owners, its own feature priorities, and its own interpretation of the allyz brand. Every LOB had a different web design system. None translated to mobile. There was no app design system anywhere.

The team reflected the same fragmentation. A single UX designer had been acting as lead — producing a north star vision entirely beyond the scope of what could be shipped. When business stakeholders approved a reduced scope, the designer would re-engage and up-scope again — creating recurring escalation cycles that cost the project time at every stage.

Around the design team: agency designers without shared process. Business owners making daily feature decisions without a product lens. A technical delivery team focused on execution, not definition. No product manager to bridge any of it. No shared north star. No shared design language. And a go-live date that would not move.

The non-negotiable deadline determined the strategy: minimum viable alignment first, deep brand work deferred to post-launch, everything in service of coherent delivery.

Before opening a file, I mapped the decision-making landscape across EU and US — identifying key stakeholders in each LOB on both sides and meeting them individually. Many had not been in a shared conversation about the product. The first intervention was simply establishing that they were all building the same thing — and that no one had agreed yet on what that thing was.

Every LOB had its own web system. None translated to mobile. I led the creation of the allyz app design system — built from scratch — a zero-to-one mobile design language serving iOS and Android simultaneously, flexible enough to serve both EU and US implementations, practical enough for a mixed team to adopt immediately under time pressure.

EU and US design teams built simultaneously — 6 internal and 9 external designers. I established the operating model, quality standards, and individual rhythms across both regions.

Working with our Design Operations Manager, I built the full infrastructure: Figma governance across all LOBs and regions; source of truth architecture from app system to LOB implementations; structured feedback and validation processes; a pre-feature opinion input channel eliminating late escalations; request centralisation; reporting cadence; retrospectives; 1:1s for all designers including agency. All built from zero. All live at go-live.

The recurring back-and-forth between design and business approval was a process problem, not a people problem. UX input was happening after business sign-off — design was always reacting to locked decisions. I moved UX input upstream into the feature definition phase, before approval. The escalation pattern stopped because the structural condition producing it was removed.

Without a defined moment of closure, every feature remained open to re-scoping indefinitely. I introduced design lock — a defined point after which direction was confirmed and engineering could proceed. This protected delivery velocity from late-stage disruption.

There was no product manager. Design absorbed it permanently — translating business intent into briefs, structuring feature definition, producing the artefacts that kept business and technical delivery aligned throughout.

Shipped on time across EU and US. allyz launched in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, with subsequent rollout to the USA and Italy.

1.5 million downloads by end of 2025. 250% year-on-year growth.

Post-launch, the organisation commissioned a specialist agency to invest in brand strategy, product strategy, and product management for the allyz ecosystem — a direct result of the persistent advocacy the design team had maintained without a mandate throughout.

The ecosystem harmonisation work is now standard practice. The overarching structures we built toward now exist. What was a novum is now normal.

The hardest decision on this project was deferring the work that was most needed — deep brand definition, real ecosystem alignment, a north star the organisation could own — because the timeline made it impossible.

That decision required understanding what velocity actually means. Speed without foundation produces movement in the wrong direction. The first work was not design — it was creating the conditions in which coherent design was possible.

The structural fix — moving UX upstream, introducing design lock, building the design ops infrastructure — was more effective than any individual intervention could have been. The system produced the coherence. The humans directed where it went.

What this project confirmed: design leadership at this level is not about producing the best design yourself. It is about building the conditions in which a distributed team can move fast, stay coherent, and ship something real.