Introduction
This blog post presents an easy-to-follow model for designing new products and service offerings for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). CBA is Australia's largest bank by market capitalisation and total assets as of June 2025. According to its 2024 annual report, 35.5% of Australians and 25.5% of businesses named CBA as their main financial institution, reflecting its importance to the overall financial system in the country. CBA attributes its success to several reasons, including strong customer relationships and its consistent history of innovation. This history of innovation has enabled it to become a leader in digital banking, providing superior digital experiences for customers.
It is no surprise therefore, that the Bank’s current strategy is to “build tomorrow’s bank today for our customers”. This strategy suggests that the Bank is not comfortable with its market-leading position. Instead, it is committed to continuing its demonstrated history of innovation to keep improving its products and service offerings.
A robust and nimble design model for designing innovative products is required to continue supporting the Bank’s strategy. The recommended model presented below integrates core concepts of Design Thinking with a few tweaks in consideration of CBA’s context. Design Thinking can be considered a process for solving problems that is human-centered and focused on user needs. A key benefit of Design Thinking is that it enables the Bank to overcome human biases like ‘how we do things here’, that often stifle innovation.
Agile and Human-Centred Product Design model
This model consists of five steps: Problem definition, Idea generation & concept selection, Prototype building & testing, Risk & accessibility checkpoint, and Product delivery. Each step is iterative and may uncover new insights that require changes to the steps completed before. It should therefore not be considered linear. Effective implementation of this model requires active leadership - leaders must go beyond simply sponsoring projects but must also act as coaches for teams implementing the model.
1. Problem Definition
With over 17 million customers, CBA collects a
large volume of information in the form of customer feedback that can be
leveraged to identify customer problems or opportunities. Key data points such
as customer complaints, customer feature requests, social media posts, and customer behavioural analysis are excellent
starting points. Artificial Intelligence models can be deployed to trawl
through the volumes of feedback data to identify key problem themes.
Relying on data is important as it reduces
bias, however, in addition to leveraging data, direct contact with customers is
critical to understand and empathise with customers. This can be performed via structured
channels like bank branches and customer support centres. Feedback can also be formally
organised through one-on-one interviews with customers, customer satisfaction surveys,
and focus groups with diverse set of customers to understand their unmet needs.
Feedback should be received with empathy to
understand customer needs. Further, conducting exploratory research on customer
trends and competitor product analysis can uncover gaps or problems in the Bank’s
existing product suite. Various specialist companies can undertake this research,
and the insights can complement feedback from customers when identifying
problems or opportunities.
With all the observations and feedback
collected, insights should be analysed and then translated into a clearly
articulated problem statement, which is the design challenge.
Output: Problem statement.
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This step is
pivotal step in the design model, with the objective of identifying a problem
or opportunity that can be translated to a new product or service offering. A
clear problem statement ensures that the Bank is solving the right problem
rather than just solving right. It is important to resist the urge to jump to
solution mode before the problem has not been clearly articulated. The Design Thinking
Playbook, referenced at the end of this blog post, offers various useful tools
that can be used this and the following steps.
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2. Idea generation & concept selection
Once a clear problem statement has been articulated, it is then possible to progress into solution mode. The objective of this step is to select the best concept that addresses the customer problem (design challenge). Various approaches for generating innovative ideas can be utilised, such as brainstorming and Customer Journey Mapping. When using brainstorming, facilitators should be sufficiently skilled to ensure they can tease out ideas from attendees, while challenging assumptions and ensuring everyone is thinking outside the box.
According to Stanford University, using "How Might We" (HMW) statements are useful as starting points for brainstorming. This is because they turn the identified problem into actionable questions that provoke creative solutions. The
Design Thinking Playbook advocates for the use of Systems Thinking when selecting
ideas. This aims to understand how the solution fits
into the existing ecosystem, for instance how a new banking product fits into
the customer's financial life, the bank's internal systems, and the regulatory
environment.
Once ideas have been generated, these should be structured and collected into themes, and the best concept should be selected based on how desirable it is to customers, whether it is technically feasible to build and whether it is viable commercially. Where there are several concepts that appear promising, a prioritisation matrix can be used to assess which ideas should be implemented. Two key aspects can be used to prioritise i.e. Effort and Impact. Highest priority should ideally be placed on highest impact concepts that do not require excessive effort.
Output: Agreed upon product concept.
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A key consideration for this step is to
involve diverse stakeholders (both staff and customers). Key staff stakeholders
involved should be aligned on the goals in this step. Platforms such as Askable
can be used to recruit customers to participate in this step.
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3. Build & Test prototype
With a product concept agreed, it is then possible to build a prototype. A prototype in this context is a scaled down version of the proposed product that can be tested by users. Once built, the product development team should take the prototype through various rounds of testing, with feedback analysed and incorporated to refine and improve the product.
Prototypes are further developed and tested in several iterations until a viable option is identified. A big number of staff at the Bank are customers of the Bank (over 50,000), and the Product Development team can leverage feedback from them as part of testing. According to the Design Thinking Playbook, valuable feedback is received when testing is done by potential users in their normal environment.
In many instances, feedback may require the development team to revisit the previous steps of the model, as fresh views of people who were not involved in the development of the prototype are received.
Output: Product
prototype.
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Prototyping is useful as it offers a cheaper way of testing the concept
before progressing into building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or the fully
fledged product. For instance, if it is a digital product, the smallest set of
testable features can be built to deliver the core value and test key
hypothesis. A detailed set of prototype testing options can be found in “The
Ultimate How-To guide for user testing”, referenced at the end of the blog
post.
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4. Risk & Accessibility Report
With a working prototype in place, a risk and accessibility review should be conducted before the delivery of the product. While this can be incorporated into previous steps of the model, it is recommended to have this as a separate step of the model, reflecting its importance.
Operating in the highly regulated financial service industry requires a level of rigour in ensuring that any products offered to customers are compliant with regulatory requirements and do not result in conduct risk. This step requires a Legal, Customer Advocacy or Risk representative from the Bank to review and sign off before development proceeds to the next step, as the impact of non-compliance is very costly.
In addition to the risk review, the proposed product should be reviewed to ensure it is accessible to all customers. This is crucial to prevent unintended discrimination and ensure inclusive design, covering factors such as race, economic status, language, age, and gender. For instance, inclusion of screen readers on online banking applications for visually impaired customers.
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One of the key findings of the Australian Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking industry (2017) was that many banking products were prioritising profit over customer interests. For this reason, it is important to have the prospective product thoroughly reviewed before roll-out. Ultimately, this is about doing the right thing for the customer. The review might require revisiting the prototype as well.
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5. Product Delivery
With a fully functional prototype, it can then be added to the relevant development backlogs where the product will be built following standard Bank processes, using an agile framework. Key stakeholders, such as the original product development team, will keep track of progress, making sure the user stories and prototype are built as per the intentions and customer expectations. As the product is rolled out, an agile mindset is still maintained to gather customer feedback and continuously improve the product.
Output: Customer centric product or service offering.
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The Banks standard development and operational processes
will be used for this step. Detailed resources can be found on the intranet.
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References:
- Bason, C.,
& Austin, R. D. (2019). The right way to lead design thinking. Harvard
Business Review, 97(2), 82-91.
- CBA (2024).
2024 Annual Report. Retrieved June 19, 2025, from https://www.commbank.com.au/content/dam/commbank-assets/investors/docs/results/fy24/2024-Annual-Report_spreads.pdf
- Dunne, D.
(2018). Implementing design thinking in organizations: An exploratory study.
Journal of Organization Design, 7(1), 1-16.
- Lewrick, M.,
Link, P., & Leifer, L. (2018). The design thinking playbook: Mindful
digital transformation of teams, products, services, businesses and ecosystems.
John Wiley & Sons.
- Liedtka, J.
(2018). Why design thinking works. Harvard Business Review, 96(5), 72-79.
- Stanford. "How
Might We" Questions - Turn your perspective into actionable provocations.
Retrieved June 19, 2025 from https://dschool.stanford.edu/tools/how-might-we-questions
- Stevens, E.
(2021). User testing: The ultimate how-to guide. In: CareerFoundry. https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/user-testing
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