Chris Avore
Vice President and Head of Design at Northwestern Mutual InsuranceChris is the Vice President and Head of Design at Northwestern Mutual Insurance where his team of product designers, content strategists, and user experience researchers imagine and build the tools to help clients grow and protect their financial legacy. In his first year at NM he’s scaled the team from about 70 to 120 leaders and practitioners, introduced experimentation and systems thinking into the product development process, and has led how design impacts customer journeys to uncover the moments that matter to the business and user.
He’s the author of 'Liftoff: Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Organization, Your Team, and You' (Rosenfeld Media 2020 with Russ Unger), and has spoken on design-centered themes such as innovation, systems thinking, unlocking the value of design and more across 4 continents.
Prior to joining Northwestern Mutual, Chris led and scaled design teams at Facebook/Meta, InVision, and Nasdaq. While at InVision, he co-authored the seminalreport The New Design Frontier that explored design maturity across thousands of companies and shaped how organizations can improve design and product development value and delivery.
Design leaders and managers are usually joining organizations that have already had a design team in the company, sometimes for many years. But that doesn’t mean that many aspects of those design organizations should not be revisited, rethought, and perhaps even redesigned. This workshop will apply a foundational but deep focus on putting some structures in place that far too often are ad-hoc, unintentional, and are just in place because no one has thought to improve them.
We’ll collaboratively examine several pillars of a high performing design team where designers, researchers, and content professionals can grow and thrive. We’ll explore elements of role clarity, career ladders, and growth plans so that your team knows its path forward. We’ll also discuss how to define and share what good—and exceptional, and unacceptable—looks like relative to how the rest of your organization rates performance and talent. We’ll also review how much time and energy your teams should be doing what tasks, and how to weight those tasks when giving feedback and evaluating quality.
Whether your team is 150, 50, or 5, or if your company has only hired designers recently or has an established practice, this workshop will enable you to reflect on the norms and expectations in your design organization. We’ll equip participants with the shared language and activities to do similar sessions with their teams when they return to work, so that teams know where they stand and have a shared interest in growing their craft and practice together.
Design teams and organizations are confronting rarely-seen degrees of turbulence, unpredictability, ambiguity, and complexity today. Generational trends and macro-economic forces are creating a pressure-cooker for business and design leaders where every decision can seemingly save or sink the company.
But there are techniques and approaches design leaders can deploy consistently with their business, product, and engineering partners, and within their design teams, that can improve your odds for success. This talk will explore those approaches by examining the role of how systems thinking prepares us for designing in complex spaces, and how experimentation gives us a path forward when we’re confronted with uncertainty in front of us and shifting foundations below us.
Walk out of this talk with a renewed focus on looking for moments of interconnected opportunities, ways to gain the insights you need to have conviction to move forward, and how to bring your leaders along with you as you successfully navigate these new environments and ecosystems.