1st Command

From April to August 2025, I served on contract at First Command as an internal innovation coach across cross-functional business units, helping transform early-stage ideas into researched, validated, and executable product opportunities.

My role went beyond facilitating workshops. I trained and coached idea owners to begin thinking like Product Owners and UX Researchers - challenging assumptions, defining customer value, evaluating business viability, identifying dependencies, testing hypotheses, and building the evidence necessary to move an idea toward investment and execution. I was tasked to bridge the communications gap between product and product owners to align as best as possible to the speed of upcoming A.i. growth, and to increase the autonomy of innovative employees to encourage idea generation and speed of execution.

I used the Business Model Canvas to help teams move beyond the idea itself and understand the larger operating model required to make it viable.

Idea owners learned to examine the complete system surrounding a proposed product or initiative: customer segments, value propositions, channels, customer relationships, key activities, resources, partnerships, cost structures, and revenue or organizational value. This was particularly valuable for exposing dependencies and assumptions that were invisible when an idea was considered only from the perspective of its feature set. The question: Can this idea function as a viable business or organizational system?

The Value Proposition Canvas brought the customer into sharper focus. I coached teams to identify the customer's jobs to be done, pains, and desired gains, then test whether the proposed products and services genuinely created value through meaningful pain relief and gain creation.

This shifted conversations away from 'We have a great idea.' toward the more important question: 'Do we understand the problem well enough to know whether this creates value for the person we're asking to use it?' The framework became a bridge between business strategy and human-centered design.

The Triple Diamond Method provided the broader innovation lifecycle. I guided teams through iterative cycles of RESEARCH -> EXPERIMENT -> DELIVER.

Beginning with stakeholder alignment and research, teams organized insights into hypotheses, generated potential solutions, prototyped and tested the strongest ideas, made evidence-based go/no-go or refactor decisions, and then carried validated concepts toward execution and measurement. The importance of the model was its refusal to treat the first idea as the answer. Teams learned to diverge before converging, test before committing, and allow evidence to reshape the solution.

My responsibility was ultimately not to run these frameworks for people. It was to teach people how to use them. I led live coaching, ideation, and product-discovery sessions that helped internal idea owners:

That innovation work extended into hands-on digital optimization through Adobe Target across First Command's digital properties. Within a financial-services environment serving active military members, veterans, and their families, I contributed to platform configuration, audience architecture, activity governance, experimentation, and personalization strategy.

Experiences could be structured around factors such as life stage, military branch, and product affinity, allowing the digital experience to respond more intelligently to different customer contexts. UX research and behavioral data informed optimization across journeys including onboarding, advisor discovery, account acquisition, and advisory booking.

The result was a practice connecting two sides of product innovation: DISCOVER THE RIGHT EXPERIENCE -> VALIDATE THE VALUE -> BUILD THE BUSINESS CASE -> PERSONALIZE & OPTIMIZE THE EXPERIENCE -> MEASURE -> LEARN -> ITERATE.