Texas
Capital Bank
Some projects are about the pixels. This one was about the room.
Texas Capital Bank had launched a Transformation Project, and Deloitte Digital was positioning to guide it. The whole thing hinged on an early exploratory workshop — the kickoff room where a bank decides whether it trusts the team in front of it. I was brought in for a short, intense engagement to help make sure that room went well.
The kickoff was the moment of truth.
The workshop had to do two jobs at once: demonstrate that the team genuinely understood the bank’s market and its pressures, and give everyone a shared framework for how the engagement could actually help. The stakes of that single room ran in both directions.
Clawing back credibility
You spend the rest of the engagement earning back the trust the kickoff was supposed to establish.
Momentum from day one
The project starts with trust and a shared direction — the room decides the team belongs there.
Research feeds strategy feeds the workshop.
I treated each move as feeding the next, not as a separate task — less “here is a deck,” more “here is a framework for how we can engage and help.”
Competitive analysis
Read not just who the competitors were, but how they played — hunting the seams where the bank’s customers weren’t being served well and an edge was plausible.
Strategic recommendations
Research that just sits there is trivia. I turned findings into a point of view — the judgment calls about which openings are real versus noise.
Workshop framing
Prepared the exploratory session end to end — a designed experience that pulls the client’s own thinking to the surface, not a presentation they watch.
Making it legible
I owned the presentation visuals — a well-designed slide does argumentative work, letting a room absorb a market position in five seconds instead of five paragraphs.
Each move feeds the next: competitive research and strategy resolve into a designed workshop, and the workshop into an aligned room — the pipeline these four steps describe.
Scope versus certainty.
A month is enough to build a strong, well-reasoned strategic story; it is not enough to prove that story with primary research. So the discipline was being rigorous about what I actually knew versus what I was inferring — grounding recommendations in real competitive evidence, and framing the workshop as exploratoryprecisely because the point was to open the conversation, not pretend we’d closed it. Designing for the right level of confidence is its own skill.
In early-stage strategy, the deliverable is alignment — and design is one of the most powerful tools for creating it.
The work fed directly into the kickoff: a consolidated competitive analysis, a set of strategic recommendations, a prepared exploratory workshop, and the visuals that carried the story into the room — a shared framework for the engagement from the very first session. The highest-leverage moment in a big transformation is often the smallest one: the kickoff.
Strategy-support work with no metrics captured in the source, so I don’t quote any.