Offsite one-pager · 23 September 2026
| Session | Manulife leadership offsite — Banking, Global WAM, Individual Insurance |
| Length | 30 minutes — about 22 presented, 8 in the room |
| Framing | Observations, insights, recommendations |
| Status | Direction check. Are we on right track, is a course correction needed |
Our approach
| Step | What we did | What it produced |
|---|---|---|
| Frame | Defined the problem and the vision for a unified experience | A shared direction for the engagement |
| Organize | Normalized the material Manulife shared into linked summaries, a working mind map, and decision timelines, using AI to accelerate synthesis | A traceable view of how the evidence and decisions connect |
| Research | Combined public research on unified authentication trends with patterns from internal engagements that centralized identity and authentication | A comparison of the high-level choices teams made, including technology stacks and authentication methods |
| Prioritize | Recorded our observations, then focused the time available on the areas of greatest concern | A deliberate scope for a broad problem that could not be examined uniformly within six weeks |
| Build | Created a detailed knowledge base to track the work, evidence, and findings | A reference for the team and the working sessions |
| Recommend | Grouped the priority areas into recommendation themes and expressed them through deliverables and diagrams | Proposed positions for discussion and decision |
Agenda
| # | Section | Min | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Engagement Overview | 3 | The cost of the status quo, why now, what this engagement adds |
| 2 | Value Proposition to LOBs | 4 | Per-LOB: what you get, what you take on, the proof point |
| 3 | Our Progression | 3 + 3 | Where we are against the six weeks, then a live walkthrough of one deliverable |
| 4 | Insights & Observations | 6 | What we read, five structural observations, our trade-offs and risks |
| 5 | Recommendations & Considerations | 7 | Six themes, the business and technology benefit of each, what we need ruled |
| 6 | Next Steps | 2 | WS 3 roadmap and cost options, with owners and dates |
| 7 | Open Discussion | rest | Three or four questions only this room can settle |
Recommendations
| Theme | Concern | We have thoughts on |
|---|---|---|
| R5 · Technology stack | Key choices for the BFF, identity stack, micro-frontend integration, and tracing are incomplete or inconsistent across documents. | The stack of record, BFF runtime, integration contracts, and end-to-end trace context. |
| R6 · Open decisions | Delivery is progressing while major choices about composition, mediation, frontend scope, and shared-platform ownership remain unresolved. | Decision ownership, architectural boundaries, and the criteria for evolving beyond the MVP pattern. |
| R1 · Identity and authorization | Downstream systems can identify the calling service, but not reliably the customer; entitlements depend on manual mappings. | How customer identity travels through the request path and where entitlement decisions should live. |
| R2 · Resilience and capacity | The dashboard depends on a long chain of systems that may not meet the stated availability or load, with no graceful fallback. | Partial availability, realistic service budgets, capacity testing, and safe cutover options. |
| R3 · Composition and channel | The architecture is browser-first even though most authentication and key product usage happens on mobile. | Where composition should sit so web and native channels can share capabilities. |
| R4 · API mediation | The proposed layer observes traffic but does not consistently enforce resilience, data protection, or ownership boundaries. | Which controls the mediation layer should own and where its first governed boundary should be. |
Some questions (time permitting)
- Is this the right shape for 30 minutes, or is there a section you would rather we spend the time on?
- State of MVP What is the current state of the MVP? Has any major decisions changed during build
- Preference on what we demo in section 3 — our redraw of your submitted MVP design, or hold for the target state once it is further along.
- Recommendation Themes Any other topics or areas you would like us to address, dive deeper into?