Today’s economy, explained.
The Ask.
Barclays Investment Bank brought me in for two very different challenges.
The first was editorial: transform a dense financial research report into an installment of the established 3 Point Perspective thought-leadership series.
The second was product design: create the conversational architecture for a Barclays Research skill on Amazon Alexa.
One involved fitting complex analysis into an existing editorial franchise.
The other involved figuring out how financial research should work when the interface is your voice.
Different formats.
Same fundamental problem:
How do you make complexity easier to navigate?
The Challenge.
The editorial challenge was about integration.
The research report had analytical depth, but the final piece needed to feel like it had always belonged within the 3 Point Perspective series—matching its tone, rhythm, and level of authority without flattening the substance.
The Alexa challenge was even more architectural.
Financial research comes with nuance, caveats, and endless possible questions. A voice interface doesn’t give users a screen full of options to choose from.
You have to anticipate what they might ask before they ask it.
Both projects demanded precision.
And both required more than good writing.
They required systems thinking.
The Insight.
For the editorial piece, the structure needed to reflect the logic of the franchise: concise, insight-led, and executive-ready.
For Alexa, the key insight was different:
Voice UX isn’t about writing clever responses. It’s about mapping possibility.
You have to think beyond the ideal interaction and account for how real people might phrase a question, misunderstand a prompt, change direction, or ask for more information.
In both cases, the writing was really an exercise in architecture.
My Solution.
For the 3 Point Perspective feature, I led the creative strategy for adapting the financial report.
Working closely with an editor, I:
Distilled the research into three sharp, defensible theses
Aligned the tone and structure with the existing series
Made sure the piece felt native to the franchise rather than retrofitted
I also partnered with Design on infographics that made the analysis easier to absorb without sacrificing authority.
For the Alexa experience, I built the conversational framework from the ground up.
That included:
A detailed copy map for voice interactions
A decision tree connecting primary prompts to logical follow-ups
A matrix of alternative utterances accounting for natural language variation
Collaboration with technical leads to draft, test, and QA the skill
The goal was to make a complicated body of research feel intuitive in a medium with very little room for ambiguity.
I also wrote the landing page announcing the experience, translating the technical product story into a clear user benefit.
The Impact.
The work:
Seamlessly integrated proprietary research into a flagship editorial series
Launched a structured, QA-tested voice experience for research delivery
Expanded Barclays’ thought leadership into an emerging voice platform
Demonstrated how narrative discipline can work across both long-form editorial and conversational UX
The formats were radically different.
The principle wasn’t.
Whether I was turning institutional research into three executive-level insights or mapping dozens of possible user intents into a voice experience, the goal was always the same:
Take something complex and give people a clear way through it.
