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 Strategy & GTM Experience
Positioning, journeys, and roadmaps for platforms where the systems are complex and the buyers are sophisticated.
- Currently leads the go-to-market program for AI integration across the Black Diamond Wealth platform (3,300+ advisory firms), unifying product, marketing, and sales behind a single intelligent-wealth strategy.
- Created the GTM Experience Design discipline at SS&C, aligning Product, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success around a shared understanding of customer needs and commercial execution
- Connects experience decisions to revenue, adoption, and retention
Corportate Innovation & Venture building
Structured discovery-to-launch machinery, plus the culture that makes people actually use it.
- Moved 6 initiatives from concept to market in five years as co-founder of ALPHALAB, SS&C's corporate innovation accelerator, built on a structured discovery-to-launch framework
- Scaled a 3-person innovation team into a global program reaching 3,000+ employees across 5 business units and 4 countries, embedding a durable culture of experimentation
- Implemented the Brightidea Innovation platform to manage innovation challenges and tailor to the needs of each business unit
Design Organizations & systems
Design functions, component libraries, and operating models that compress the distance from concept to proof.
org
- Established and scaled the product design organization behind an enterprise SaaS platform serving 3,300+ advisory firms managing $1.3 trillion in assets
- Architected a unified design system now used by 25 agile teams, eliminating design-to-development rework
- Rebuilt the Bloomberg Government platform end-to-end, establishing design as a strategic function with standing influence on executive decision-making
- Delivered two Webby Award–winning campaigns leading the Experience Design & Strategy practice at Isobar for Fidelity Investments, Boston Celtics, TD Bank, and adidas
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.
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.
Results
Curiosity in Action
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
- 6 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.
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?
I speak and run workshops for leadership teams, product organizations, and conferences — as a keynote, a half-day working session, or a multi-week cohort program.
Sessions are always built around your business need, not a stock deck.
Topics
Product strategy
Finding opportunities hidden inside customer behavior — then deciding what to build, what to stop, and why.
Enterprise design
Building systems that scale — design organizations, design systems, and the operating models that keep quality intact as teams multiply.
Innovation
Turning ideas into repeatable business capability, through accelerators, cohort programs, and a structured path from concept to launch.
AI transformation
Helping organizations integrate AI into products and into ways of working — where it changes outcomes, not where it decorates a roadmap.
Go-to-market
Connecting product innovation with commercial success: positioning, segmentation, and the customer journey from awareness to retention.
Whether you're launching a product, scaling innovation, working out where AI fits into your business, or looking for someone to lead it — I'd like to hear about it.