Medibank is Australia’s largest health insurer, serving millions of customers through their digital platforms and health services.
Their Digital Labs team drives innovative digital strategy and problem solving across the organization, tackling complex problems that span multiple business areas and stakeholder groups.
Challenge: innovation trapped in slow silos
For most product teams, innovation feels like swimming against the tide. At Medibank, the Digital Labs team was tackling increasingly complex challenges — concept development cycles that could stretch up to six months, with teams working across multiple business units before achieving stakeholder alignment.
The real challenge wasn’t just time — it was managing complexity at scale. With stakeholders scattered across business units and hybrid work environments, and senior executives juggling competing priorities, achieving alignment on major initiatives required careful orchestration. Knowledge lived in different systems, critical insights were spread across various teams, and coordinating input from multiple stakeholders meant navigating busy calendars and competing priorities.
“We had people using a mixture of PowerPoint, Excel, Jira, Confluence, with bits of insight living in people’s heads. Everything was scattered, and we desperately needed one place to capture it all.”
Ben Abbott, Product Leader at Medibank Digital Labs
When working on large-scale initiatives, teams would invest significant time developing concepts, only to discover they needed to refine their approach based on stakeholder feedback. The challenge was finding more efficient ways to gather input, validate ideas, and achieve alignment across diverse business areas.
Solution: real-time collaborative innovation
Medibank’s Digital Labs team had already been using Miro across various business units, developing their proven Discovery & Research Toolkit over time. But then came a true test of whether their approach could work at scale — accelerating from idea to prototype alignment in record time.
The ultimate test arrived with their most ambitious project yet: reimagining medibank.com.au, a project that would typically take half a year. But Ben was set the goal to achieve it within just six weeks.
This wasn’t just any website redesign. It was Medibank’s digital front door — their primary sales and engagement channel — requiring input from over 80 stakeholders across the entire enterprise, many of them senior executives with packed calendars. The aim wasn’t to create a production-ready design, but rather a conceptual UX vision, something that could give hubs and squads a shared starting point and a clear direction heading into discovery.
Using Miro’s collaborative features, the team captured over 140 pain points and countless use cases from across the business, creating tailored templates for each area that could be visualized in one living board. Instead of starting meetings from scratch, senior executives could immediately see the complete picture and help prioritize use cases in real-time.
“What made this a breakthrough moment was how we used Miro to bring order to the madness of this ambitious undertaking. We engaged early, capturing over 140 pain points and even more use cases from across the enterprise. With Miro, we were able to create and share tailored templates for each business area in one place, making it easy to visualize everything in one living board”
Ben Abbott, Product Leader at Medibank Digital Labs
Beyond this UX vision project, product teams across Medibank use Miro daily. The magic happened for them when AI-powered workflows entered the equation. Tasks that previously consumed entire days — like clustering and reviewing stakeholder feedback — became click-and-validate exercises. Teams could shift from administrative work to strategic thinking, using AI to transform messy brainstorming sessions into polished product briefs ready for immediate implementation.
“With AI-powered clustering, tagging and summarising, it’s now a click-and-validate process. Our teams can shift from admin to insight, and use that time for deeper thinking.”
Ben Abbott, Product Leader at Medibank Digital Labs
Team and AI collaboration became particularly powerful when generating solution opportunity trees — visual frameworks that helped teams surface blind spots and spark fresh ideas in the moment. This wasn’t just about working faster; it was about enhancing creative thinking with AI capabilities to accelerate from idea to outcome.
Impact: from months to weeks, repeatably
The transformation was remarkable. What stakeholders initially described as “a really fun six-month project” achieved stakeholder alignment and a clear prototype vision in just six weeks — a 75% reduction in time from idea to outcome. But speed was only part of the story.
“When everyone’s solving the same problem, in the same space, at the same time — that’s when the magic happens. That’s how six weeks becomes not just possible, but repeatable.”
Ben Abbott, Product Leader at Medibank Digital Labs
The collaborative approach eliminated traditional back-and-forth cycles. Instead of teams disappearing for weeks only to return with solutions that could potentially miss the mark, real-time co-creation meant issues were identified and resolved immediately. Senior executives, who previously struggled to find time for lengthy review cycles, could now provide meaningful input in single, focused sessions — a game-changer when working with 80+ stakeholders.
The success validated their existing toolkit approach and showed how bringing teams and AI together in a shared workspace can enhance strategic thinking. Far from replacing team insight, AI-generated solution opportunity trees helped teams explore possibilities they might have missed, creating richer, more comprehensive outcomes.
With AI-enabled workflows, the time savings are starting to become even more dramatic. Across all business units, product teams now have the opportunity to convert stakeholder feedback into actionable product briefs, which reduces a day-long exercise to mere minutes. Teams can redirect their energy from administrative tasks to solving complex customer problems.
The bigger picture: augmenting teamwork with AI
As Medibank has discovered, combining collaborative and artificial intelligence creates a multiplier effect:
“These new tools help us do more in a single session than we used to in three. It’s about maximising the value of the time you’ve got with your most in-demand people.”
Ben Abbott, Product Leader at Medibank Digital Labs
