How one designer gave half of Britain a better bank in 90 Days
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Aki Sirawongprasert didn’t have months. She had weeks. Here’s the three-word formula she used to rewire how Lloyds Banking Group, one of the world’s oldest banks, thinks about its customers.
Aki Sirawongprasert purposely left her umbrella in London. She was heading to Spain for Beyond the Map, the first-ever journey management conference. Held in October at the Disseny Hub in Barcelona, she was expecting a break from England’s wet, grey skies, but it was raining when she took the stage.
Fitting, she thought. Her presentation, delivered to a packed auditorium of designers, changemakers, and innovators, was about what happens when organizations plan for sunshine but hit bad weather.
“Journey management is about large-scale change,” she told the audience. “And when it comes to change, we first must understand and appreciate the dynamics and unique history that make up an organization.”
As the Lead Service Designer at Lloyds Banking Group, Sirawongprasert knew what she was talking about. She heads one of the UK’s largest in-house service design practices, with over 100 service designers shaping customer experiences across 16 brands. And Lloyds had a lot of history.
Founded in 1765, with roots stretching back to 1695, it now serves nearly half the UK’s population across 16 distinct brands, including Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Scottish Widows, and Lex Autolease. It employs 65,000 people. In almost every sense, it is colossal.
And yet, for all its scale, Lloyds had a problem that would be familiar to anyone who has worked inside a large organization: No one could quite see the whole picture.
28M
CUSTOMERS
nearly half the UK population
65K
COLLEAGUES
serving customers daily
300+
YEARS
of history to navigate
The four big rocks
At the start of 2025, Sirawongprasert was given an unusually direct brief: Take a look at journey management and see if it could solve some of the organization’s biggest problems. And do it quickly. Think in days and weeks, not months and years. For someone who loves picking problems apart and figuring out how to solve them, it was exactly the kind of challenge she was looking for.
Once she got inside the work, the patterns became clear. What looked like disconnected issues were, in fact, structural. She identified four obstacles she calls “big rocks,” the things that make it genuinely difficult for a complex organization to manage its customer experience coherently.
No single “helicopter view.”There was no unified way to see how customer experiences cut across products, brands, lifecycle stages, or organizational boundaries.
No common languageDifferent teams used different words for the same concepts, spending more time aligning on terminology than solving problems.
Static mapsJourney maps were carefully created, then left to age. The same issues resurfaced year after year, making the work feel both futile and expensive.
Service design on the sidelinesA discipline with the potential to drive real change was too often working in the background, rather than shaping decisions where it mattered.
“We were stuck in this cycle of map, remap, map, remap. It was personally and professionally frustrating and really expensive for the organization,” Sirawongprasert told the Beyond the Map audience. She had spent years crafting journey maps, taking pride in their precision, only to see the same pain points return again and again.
Three Ps formula
After months of listening, testing, iterating, and convincing, Sirawongprasert distilled her approach into what she describes as a “simple magic formula.” It included three Ps: principles, people, and pace.
Principles
Before you scale anything, you need to be clear on what guides it. At Lloyds, that came down to three things as well: empathy, clarity, and iteration.
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“I do think we sometimes forget about empathy when it comes to change management and journey management,” said Sirawongprasert. “Understanding the humans you’re working with and asking, Why would they care? What do they absolutely not want to hear about?”
Clarity comes next. She calls it radical simplicity. If the work can’t be explained in a way people immediately understand, it doesn’t travel or scale. It disappears.
Finally, iteration is what makes the whole thing move. “Treat your journey framework, your tools, your methods, your playbooks as prototypes,” she told the room. Waiting for perfection is just another way of standing still.
People
The third P of her simple magic formula proved to be the real challenge: people. As Sirawongprasert found, it wasn’t the strategy, but the rollout, which involved the people who could make everything happen. “We went in with this naive mindset,” she said. “Oh my God, everyone’s going to love this. Journey management is going to change the world.”
Some people did, and they became the champions. But others hesitated. “I had questions thrown at me left, right, and center,” she recalled. “What are you asking me to do? Is this on top of my day job?”
She and her team had spent months building a framework, refining playbooks, and polishing every method. When they launched it all at once, some people pushed back with a strong response:
“This isn’t how we’ve done things before.”“This is going to take time.” “Where do I fit in this?”
She recognized that this wasn’t resistance; it was uncertainty. People felt outside their comfort zone, so explaining more or pushing harder wouldn’t help.
What did she learn from this? “Stop persuading and selling,” she said. “Start empowering people to understand their role in this and where they fit.”
The language problem
Lloyds, like most large organizations, had accumulated layers of overlapping terminology: journey, process, service, capability, touchpoint, channel, product. Each team used these words slightly differently. Conversations slowed before they even began. The issue wasn’t just confusion. It was misalignment.
Her team’s response was to build what they call a Journey Atlas, a catalog of journeys across brands, platforms, and business units, paired with a clear taxonomy of what each term actually means.
How you name your journeys really does matter,” she said. A journey reflects a customer's goal. A service supports it. A capability enables it. “Getting a mortgage” is a journey. “Onboarding” is not. “Resetting a password” is a journey. “Digital capability” is not. These were small distinctions, but the mindset shifts they created had big consequences.
Pace
The third P, pace, might be the most counterintuitive for practitioners trained to be thorough. Speed, in design culture, can feel risky. Sirawongprasert reframes it. “You have to put your foot on the accelerator,” she said. “Without pace, you’re burning calories. You lose the energy and momentum.”
Looking back at her calendar, there was a clear rhythm. Every two weeks, without exception, she was in front of teams running sessions, joining meetings, and continuing the conversation. That consistency created something critical to their success: the perception of movement.
Move the conversation from optional to urgent. Create FOMO. Make the work visible. Show up in rooms you weren’t invited to. “Every one of those is a chance to shift the narrative,” she said.
The results, ten months in
Sirawongprasert is careful not to overclaim. “The mission is never complete,” she said. But the progress, for a 300-year-old institution with 65,000 colleagues and 16 brands, is substantial.
Lloyds now has what it didn’t have at the start of the year: a unified, group-approved approach to managing customer experiences. The Journey Atlas is live and evolving, already containing more than 500 journeys and growing. Brands and marketing are now using the same lifecycle language as the service design team, and that language is making its way into reports that reach the boardroom. Service design, once working quietly on the sidelines, is now being championed at the C-suite level.
“It just felt so good to hear our C-suite talk about service design,” she said. “We’ve come a really long way.”
When asked how she managed upward, not just outward, Sirawongprasert pointed to what she calls “immersion experiences” for executives: hands-on sessions that move beyond slides and into direct engagement with the work. Designed as prototypes, these sessions give senior leaders a tangible sense of what journey management can reveal about the organization.
The question of success, she noted, comes down to three things.
Efficiency: Reducing duplication across teams and brands.
Financial impact: Connecting journey insights to investment and prioritization decisions.
Innovation: Using a clearer, end-to-end view to identify unmet needs and new opportunities.
Not a finished system, but a working one.
The silver lining for the rest of us
Sirawongprasert closed her talk with a provocation. The three Ps, she said, are portable. They don’t belong to Lloyds. They don’t even belong to banking. They are a way of thinking about any large-scale change effort that involves people who don’t yet understand why it matters.
The formula works, she explains, because it starts where change actually starts: with the people inside the organization who will either carry the work forward or not. Get those humans right, and the rest follows. Get them wrong, and no amount of beautiful journey mapping will save you.
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Ten months into one of the more ambitious service design transformations in British financial services, the lesson was clear: Journey management isn’t about planning for perfect conditions. It’s about creating the context for better decisions, so teams know what to do next, whatever the weather.
For organizations trying to make customer-centricity real, that’s the shift. A shared understanding of the journey that connects teams, aligns decisions, and turns fragmented work into meaningful progress.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Journey management is still new territory for many organizations, and the work of turning insight into action is rarely straightforward.
That’s exactly why Beyond the Map exists.
Continue the conversation
If you have a journey management story to share, what worked, what didn’t, and what actually moved the needle, you can submit a proposal and contribute to the conversation.
And if you’re looking to learn from others navigating the same challenges, early bird tickets are now available.