STRATEGY | FORESIGHT | DESIGN
Founder:, Chief Strategy Officer
Email:
Functional Expertise:
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Strategy Design & Deployment
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Strategic Foresight & Scenario Planning
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Organization Design
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Change Management
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Portfolio and Product Strategy
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Product Innovation and Product Design
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Lean Systems / Lean Thinking (Theory of Constraints)
Curiousity, Clarity, Competency...by Design.
"Designers have a prescriptive job.
We suggest how the world might be; we are futurists to some extent."
– Brigitte Borja de Mozota
Will advises successful firms in fintech, pharma, healthcare, and e-commerce. He helps them innovate, create new markets, and restructure for value. He integrates foresight and strategy with human-centered design to delight customers, shape markets, and increase profitability.
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Will has led transformational initiatives for Fortune 50 companies across various industries. He has designed and launched multiple game-changing products. Will has also created and scaled enterprise digital/product transformation offices. These offices sustain cultures of continuous discovery and delivery. He guides clients on driving innovation and the necessary behavioral and culture changes.
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As a creative visionary, Will founded LeanWX NYC, the premier global conference exploring the future of work. For over eight years, he curated a unique, multidisciplinary event. It brought together global thought leaders, practitioners, and innovators. LeanWX NYC combined Design Thinking, Product Strategy, Lean Process Design, Complexity Theory, and DevOps. This approach addressed the entire organizational spectrum. It covered designing loved products, creating effective teams, and fostering innovative ecosystems.​​
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The next generation of design thinkers and lean practitioners inspires Will. He has lectured as Design-Thinker-in-Residence at NYU's Stern School of Business. Will has run design innovation workshops with Simon Sinek at the TED Global conference. He has given keynote talks on various topics at conferences like SxSW, TEDX, and Agile Alliance.
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Will holds a Jonah certification in Theory of Constraints from the Goldratt Institute in Israel. He authored "Designing Resilience: The Strategy, Structure, and Spirit of Enterprise Agility." Will speaks and consults globally. He has published many articles on design, innovation, culture change, complexity, and resilience.
Will lives in Boca Raton with his wife, Rabbi Laila Haas, and their son, Asher, who loves teaching us all beginner's mindset, and honing his discovery, design, and disruption craft.
Key Engagements
2023 - 2024
Industry: Insurance
Organizational design (Structure, Governance, Process, Vendor Mgmt, Metrics) for Top 10 Worker's Comp InsureCo including restructuring IT, EPMO, and Business Technology teams across Policy, Underwriting, Claims, Billing and Collections into 4 tier software delivery model. Introduced Portfolio Strategy and Structure, including team structures, R&R, Decision Rights, Measures for stabilizing a highly customized Guidewire implementation. Established 3yo Enterprise Straetgic Roadmap, consolidating demand and rationalizing prioritization against 3 SteerCos (Policy & Billing, Claims, Underwriting Distribution).
2022 - 2023
Industry: Transportation
For a 125 year old global publishing enteprise facing competitive and pricing pressures from suppliers, disruption from new entrants leveraging A.I; we leveraged a bespoke challenge-based strategic cascade and facilitated a 5 mo project to develop the corporate vision, strategy, and portfolios, identify strategic opportunities and build an executable OpModel, Enterprise Roadmap for 2024-2029, secured budget approval from business unit leadership,to establish data science and enterprise data insights capability by 2H 2024.
2019 - 2021
Industry: InsureTech
For a large InsurTech leader processing 18 Million P&C claims per year, data science and AI are the core strategic assets but were disconnected from Product Strategy, Design, and Development. Product wasn’t integrating new A.I. capabilities into the product lines, numerous instances of missteps engaging in collaborative innovation labs with large carriers, no discernable return on investments. Moved from undirected design and A.I. model research to directed research aligned to enterprise strategic priorities and customer needs. Restructured Product and Innovation governance and processes, established UX/Customer research capability with weekly executive read-outs, established innovation incubation lab, creating multiple cross-domain, cross-disciplined innovation teams.
2018 - 2019
Industry: Pharmaceutical
A Fortune 200 Pharmaceutical Company had spent close to 4 years and $300M trying to bring a Integrated, A.I.-Enabled Wireless Insulin solution (Pen, BGM, App, Data, Physicials Portal) to market with no results. We were brought in for an organizational redesign from highly-matrixed, siloed, functionally and regionally aligned OpModel to Product-Driven Organization. Redesigned teaming (RACI/Competency) structures, governance policies and processes and policies, QA, Regulatory, and compliance to reduce time-to-FDA. Introduced Customer Journey Mapping and Jobs-to-be-Done framework to upskill Product Mgmt capabilities. After stress-testing and validating the market and customer need, as well as GTS, we established a new Portfolio and Product Teams around core dosing capabilities, and levaged SOA and remote teams for all non-strategic functionality. The primary contraints were the separate quality and compliance governance processes and teams, which needed to be deconstructed, integrated with the OpModel, and quality tests written into Kanban exit criteria. This change signifantly improved feature throughput and resulted in a successful FDA prototype submission in 8 months, and in-market launch in 17 months.