We are looking for a GM to join our leadership team and lead the growth of our insurance practice, guiding teams to do exceptional design work across the insurance space and cultivating deep design partnerships across the insurance value chain. You’ll work closely with the managing partners of Runyon as well as dedicated design teams to source and develop new design-driven relationships within insurance; craft and win digital design, incubation, and growth strategy projects for the firm; and guide leading edge product and venture design teams as they work to shape disruptive, revenue-generating experiences and ventures for a range of insurance players. 

Insurance is one of Runyon’s largest portfolio categories of depth. We have worked together with forward-thinking leaders to design new digital experiences and incubate new ventures with insurance partners such as Great American, New York Life, Accelerant, Kuvare, Argo, Western & Southern and others. You will build our insurance practice with our existing portfolio as your foundation and you will be asked to grow it further by inspiring new ways of working and applying new technologies. 

Leaders at Runyon are highly strategic, detail-oriented, and experienced in product design and venture incubation, and have deep, practical experience from design research to UX/UI design to business model design to growth strategy. You share our deep empathy for user needs and have the ability to develop a deep understanding of a client partner’s insurance business, generate insights, and translate those into a plan of value-accretive action. You can develop and guide strong relationships and can effortlessly build trust with core decision-makers, both internally at Runyon and externally with insurance client partners.

From a collaboration standpoint, a candidate in this role will guide teams to drive the design strategy for the full lifecycle of the product from vision, research and conception to launch and optimization, while supporting the team in execution. As a GM, Insurance Portfolio, you should have the ability to evaluate and weigh a range of disparate inputs, including external market activity, user needs and partners’ capabilities. You will develop structured and logical frameworks from which to prioritize and recommend the most relevant and differentiated experience opportunities. After having selected the optimal direction for a new experience or venture, you will define the strategic and tactical steps to capture those opportunities: via product roadmap (sequence and prioritization of activities), experience and feature selection (higher vs. lower impact, evaluating differentiation, etc.), and qualifying future optimizations and opportunity.

About Runyon

Runyon is a product design and venture studio that helps companies grow. We are a team of customer-centered designers, researchers, and strategists that crafts new products, experiences and ventures. Our approach combines customer needs and behaviors with leading edge business strategy. Our work is sprint- and prototype-driven and we think about how we can craft strategies and products into the market in ways that are meaningful and measured from the start. Our team has decades of experience working with some of the largest global partners including Disney, The New York Times, American Express, Target and others.

• We're prototyping-led. We lead with tangible assumptions in the form of prototypes and test them with real stakeholders to validate and refine our strategy and design. Regardless of discipline, we think and communicate in concepts, and use those to move further, faster.
• We're detailed and intentional. We always back up our design decisions with sound reasoning—be it user research, market research, or both. We make things that make sense and that have a clear through line.
• We're fast. We work almost exclusively in sprints, and with lean teams. We need folks who like to run.
• We're collaborative. We jam as a multidisciplinary team of specialists who collectively contribute to the full spectrum of work across user research, strategy and design to arrive at high quality outcomes.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Work collaboratively on and with the managing partners to ensure that the business development process for our insurance vertical is integrated with our human-centered and business-focused design projects as well as our resourcing approach
• Plan and drive conversations with prospective client partners within insurance to understand their key needs, hunches, and challenges while sharing how Runyon’s approach and collaborative partnership could be valuable
• Capture and convey the value of collaborative engagements through the crafting and writing of compelling design-driven proposals and winning work
• Active guidance of insurance-focused project teams to concept new experiences, services and ventures that can ladder up to a new, differentiated offerings in the market and deliver exceptional outcomes for our client partners
• Encourage deep partnership across cross-functional teams, thereby establishing a space where ideas readily flow and everyone feels empowered to do their best work
• Solve complex product design problems using a hypothesis driven approach
• Provide a business-driven perspective to share and frame designs
• Orchestrate design disciplines and approaches (research, UX, visual design, etc.) to craft a cohesive and structured approach for user-centered problem solving
• Communicate clearly with teammates and senior client stakeholders, and present work appropriately (verbally and in partner-facing decks)

QUALIFICATIONS 

• 10 years of experience leading strategy and/or product design teams at a design studio or within a consultancy, dedicated to the design of growth-focused insurance experiences and ventures
• Deep relationships in the insurance services and/or insurtech sectors
• A portfolio of work that demonstrates leadership in translating research into generative, effective outcomes within insurance across a range of design projects and deliverables (UX/UI, service design, product design, etc.)
• Ability to look at a situation, deconstruct it, and devise a way to make it better
• Appreciates the power of storytelling and has experience presenting those stories to senior partners
• A desire to lead and engage with collaborative, multi-disciplinary teams which include our partners
• Ability to persuasively present and defend strategic thinking and synthesis, in addition to listening and modifying your thinking based on the contributions and perspectives of others
• Experience developing and honing creative strategies (e.g. hosting events, going to conferences, tapping referrals of your broader network, etc.) that can yield promising and relevant engagements
• Great communication and collaboration abilities, including the skill to direct and manage small teams
• You thrive in ambiguity, and have a propensity to experiment with generative ideas in order to identify the most innovative and disruptive solutions