Product Strategy & Enterprise design leader · Innovation catalyst
Empowering organizations to discover new opportunities align cross-functional teams and turn complex challenges into market-ready solutions.
What I build
Organizational Impact
Building the capability between a good idea and a market that pays for it — the teams, the products, the go-to-market motions. Enterprise platforms where the stakes are high and nothing is simple, from Bloomberg Government to SS&C's Black Diamond.
Product & experience strategy
Positioning, journeys, and roadmaps for platforms where the systems are complex and the buyers are sophisticated.
- Created the GTM Experience Design discipline at SS&C, aligning product, marketing, sales, and customer success
- Owns GTM strategy end to end — awareness through onboarding and retention
- Connects experience decisions to revenue, adoption, and retention
Innovation programs that ship
Structured discovery-to-launch machinery, plus the culture that makes people actually use it.
- Co-founded ALPHALAB — 3 initiatives concept to market, 6 cohorts trained
- Scaled a 3-person team into a program across 5 business units and 4 countries
- Facilitation frameworks that get cross-functional teams to decisions faster
Organizations and systems
Design functions, component libraries, and operating models that compress the distance from concept to proof.
- Recruited and grew the product design org 0→8 across 25 agile teams
- Unified design system that eliminated design-to-development rework
- AI-assisted prototyping now takes concept to POC in days, not weeks
Leadership Philosophy
Great organizations are built by empowered people working toward a shared purpose.
My role isn't to have the answers. It's to create the clarity, trust, and momentum that let teams solve hard problems together.
The most impactful innovation happens when different perspectives align around a common vision — held together by a culture of curiosity, experimentation, and accountability.
I connect business strategy to customer insight, design thinking, and the latest emerging technology. Building teams, standing up innovation programs, or guiding an AI transformation — what I'm actually building is capability that outlasts the project.
Empower your team through mentorship and coaching — not micromanagement.
Hiring is leadership's highest-leverage move. Get it right, and the team thrives. Get it wrong, and everyone feels it.
If your only connection to your team is through scheduled 1:1s, you're already disconnected. Leadership happens in the moments between the meetings.
1:1s aren't for you to vent — they're for your team to feel heard. Listen with intent. Talk less. Coach when invited.
Creative teams aren't built on templates. Get to know each person — how they think, what they need, and where they want to go.
My job is to advocate for your growth at the leadership table. Your job? Make that case undeniable through your craft and your impact.
As a mentor, I'm here to get you ready for what's next — whether that's a bigger role here or your next big thing elsewhere.
Lead with respect and humility. Today's direct report could be tomorrow's hiring manager. The table always turns.
My Approach
Always Be Curious
Curiosity is what pushes us to look beyond assumptions, understand people more deeply, and discover opportunities others don't see. It is the discipline of remaining open long enough for insight to emerge.
Not a personality trait. It can be structured, taught, resourced, and measured like any other business function.
The organizations that ask better questions earlier spend less proving the obvious and more building the valuable.
The Curiosity Framework is how I help leaders find opportunity before their competitors recognize it: a repeatable path from noticing a need to changing the business to act on it.
Each stage has a mindset, a set of activities, the leadership behaviors that make it work, what it produces, and what it's worth to the business.
Observe
Before anything can be questioned, it has to be seen clearly.
Select Transformation Impact
The results of a curious nature
Multiple organizations, twenty years, one pattern: notice something, ask a better question, and build the capability to answer it repeatedly.
- Challenge
- Two consecutive acquisitions had left design fragmented and inconsistent, and the platform was still a reporting application rather than a wealth management platform.
- Approach
- Built the product design function from zero, established the craft standards and accountability model, and architected a white-label design system that clients could theme without losing coherence.
- Outcome
- 0 to 8 designers supporting 25 agile teams, on a platform serving 3,300+ advisory firms managing $1.3 trillion — and industry recognition every year since 2019.
- Challenge
- A federation of independent business units where good ideas existed everywhere and travelled nowhere. Most employees assumed innovation was something leadership did to them.
- Approach
- Co-founded an internal accelerator modeled on Y Combinator and Techstars, with a structured discovery-to-launch path and cohort training that produced intrapreneurs rather than suggestion boxes.
- Outcome
- 3 initiatives from concept to market in five years, 8 cohorts trained, and a 3-person team grown into a funded global program reaching 3,000+ employees across 5 business units and 4 countries.
- Challenge
- A platform serving policy professionals with dense legislative, regulatory, and market data had grown feature-first, and the experience hadn't kept pace with the depth beneath it.
- Approach
- Led the end-to-end redesign across web and mobile, established the design language and experience standards, and operationalized Lean UX so design worked inside agile delivery rather than upstream of it.
- Outcome
- A coherent platform at scale, and design repositioned from downstream execution to a standing voice in executive decision-making.
- Challenge
- A global brand whose digital front door didn't carry the weight of the brand behind it.
- Approach
- Directed experience strategy and design for the homepage redesign, building the concept and the case that carried it through a global organization.
- Outcome
- Two Webby Awards, and a materially elevated global digital presence for the brand.
- Challenge
- A franchise with one of the deepest histories in professional sport, and a digital experience that had to serve lifelong fans and newcomers at once.
- Approach
- Led experience strategy and design, working from how fans actually follow a team rather than from how the organization is structured.
- Outcome
- A differentiated, customer-centric digital experience built on the same observe-and-question discipline applied to a very different audience.
Everett Hagan
I'm a product and experience executive with twenty years spent where the systems are complex and the stakes are high — Bloomberg Government, SS&C's Black Diamond Wealth platform, and, before that, Isobar, working with Fidelity, TD Bank, the Boston Celtics, and adidas.
I've built design organizations from zero, co-founded a corporate venture accelerator, launched a global innovation program, and now lead the go-to-market program for AI integration across a platform used by 3,300+ advisory firms. The through-line across all of it is the same discipline: notice something, ask a better question, and build the capability to answer it again and again.
I'm based in Jacksonville, Florida, and work remotely across the US.
innovation leadership
concept to market
innovation program built
(adidas, Isobar)
From craft to organizations
The same career read two ways: the work got bigger, and the unit of work changed. Early on I designed the product. Since 2016 I've designed what makes products possible.
Research and IA for Nationwide, Diebold, CheckFree.
Fidelity, Celtics, TD Bank, adidas. Two Webbys.
Rebuilt BGOV end to end. Lean UX into agile.
Built the design function 0→8, supporting 25 agile teams.
3 people → global program. Co-founded ALPHALAB.
Leads the AI go-to-market program for Black Diamond.
2016 is the hinge. Before it, the deliverable was a product. After it, the deliverable was a capability the company kept — a design org, an accelerator, a discipline that outlives any one launch.
Awards
On attribution: the Webby Awards were for work I directed at Isobar. The platform awards were won by SS&C's Black Diamond during my leadership tenure — earned by the whole organisation, not by any one person.
Lets Connect
Are you Curious?
Whether you're launching a product, scaling innovation, working out what AI actually changes for your business, or looking for someone to lead it — I'd like to hear about it.