Insurance
12 weeks
Playbook
The organization is equipped with experienced leaders, deep domain expertise, and decades of institutional knowledge. It's a team that has earned its credibility over time. And a core part of delivering on their regulatory mission is NAIC's internal product group whose ability to move quickly and make sound decisions directly shapes how effectively the industry gets served.
Product ownership was fragmented across portfolios. Priority calls escalated to the leadership team not because they were genuinely complex, but because accountability was unclear. In a politically sensitive environment with long-tenured leaders who valued stability, those patterns had quietly hardened over time. A new technology strategy wasn't what NAIC needed. They needed clarity on how decisions actually get made and a structure their people could trust.
Technology organization leaders
In the technology organization
People interviewed
We started by listening. Before designing anything, we spent time with the CTO, his directs, and individual contributors understanding how decisions actually moved through the organization, where friction lived, and what political realities shaped behavior. Ambiguity was the number one challenge they were facing.
From there, we ran a structured workshop series, moving deliberately through:
* The sequencing was intentional: build psychological buy-in before introducing structural disruption. We used their language, their existing frameworks, and their real dynamics.
A Product Playbook defining how product decisions get made, escalated, and owned across the enterprise
A tiered governance model that separates enterprise, portfolio, and product-level decisions to resolve the friction that had been reaching the executive table
Leadership behavior commitments designed to translate structural clarity into practice
Org structure recommendations, including a proposed portfolio-level Director of Product to bring cross-product accountability
A phased rollout roadmap sequenced to shift leadership behavior before structural change, reducing the risk of defensive resistance
Leaders who had been absorbing escalations due to ambiguity now have a clear system to point to. And the playbook didn't just document an operating model, it built the shared language NAIC needed to govern itself. When leaders saw governance as decision logic rather than meetings and hierarchies, it landed differently. For an organization this politically complex, that shift in framing was the real deliverable.
