Northwestern Mutual

At Northwestern Mutual, I was lucky to be a part of the innovation team. We took and created ideas, innovate and executed on them, and moved onto the next one.

Sometimes, that meant exploring a venture in an adjacent market to NM's core business and running it like a pure startup. Other times, it meant delivering on internal software that provided new ways for NM financial reps to work more efficiently

No matter the project, they always involved starting from square one, taking the idea from the research/discovery/development phase all the way until a production rollout.

Projects

Proquo started off as a platform that gave athletes rewards for performing well in public events. These "bounties" gave the users discounts from retailers like Nike and Garmin, in exchange for the user's consented data.

As the pandemic hit and events and races started to shut down, Proquo made a pivot to become a racing platform, specializing in virtual events. We'd noticed how a lot of the race managers we were working with had a need here, and it provided a new route to move forward and stay relevant with as COVID remained detrimental.

Plan Execution

Plan Execution was a project to develop, research, and test an app that automates clients' financial goals.

A financial rep could help a user come up with concrete, prioritized goals for a client, then hand it off to our system to do the money movement automatically for them each month.

After 6 months of research and development, we successfully got the company to notice the product's viability; the project was handed off to another team for continued development.

MIB️

MIB is a vendor that works with healthcare organization to provide an electronic health record API. We wanted to figure out if it could be a viable solution for more efficient underwriting.

As the sole engineer on this project, it was my job to build some scripts that could ingest >17,000 NM applicants, search for EHRs using MIB's API, and report back the hit rate and speed of results. The results of this research/POC was the eventual green-light and handoff for a different team to build out a fully featured app. It proved to be even more useful in overcoming the challengs of underwriting in the COVID era.

Exam Connect

Exam Connect is a webapp that helps financial representatives schedule paramedical exams for insurance applicants.

Exam Connect was piloted successfully, and handed off to another team for maintenance. Financial reps now use this daily, providing a much smoother process than the old days of calling back and forth between applicant and exam vendor.

Other responsibilities

• Maintenance of NM's innovation website