New In The Job

...in the design sector.

What’s the appointment? Kris Nygren has just been appointed general manager for Auckland-based design company Optimal Usability.

Where was he before? Heading up Sovereign Insurance’s market innovation team.

So where did he start out? With a marketing degree from Stockholm University, says Mr Nygren. “I’m Swedish, born and raised [and] educated.” He also later studied in Australia.

And from there? From there he worked at various places; including a period at Unisys as a senior solutions specialist, and work as a strategy manager and incubator business manager at Fonterra, prior to joining Sovereign Insurance, where he worked for five years.

Er, what is a “market innovation team”, exactly? Mr Nygren says the team was formed to address a need for Sovereign to adjust their business model. “It was basically a ‘let’s put a team together to have a crack at changing the business model, having a look at new customers, new markets.’”

How does a marketing degree connect to work at a design company? More closely than you might think! My Nygren says he’s never really been in a pure marketing role. “At Sovereign I had roles that were similar, or responsibilities or projects that were in that vein, but really it all was about building new stuff, bringing the consumers in.”

So how did he hear about Optimal Usability? Shortly after he joined Sovereign Insurance, he hired the then-fledgling consultancy to inject some user input into the design of a new online insurance channel.

Eh? Making it more user-friendly – which is what Optimal Usability is all about, whether it be websites, products or services.

They must have hit it off. Sounds like it. He said although the company had a small involvement in the project, they made a large impact. Letting customers lead the design improved the speed and the results. “It was crazy fast,” says Mr Nygren. “We just followed what the user research told us, and didn’t get distracted by what we thought people wanted.”

That’s a problem? Yeah, it really is.“If you’re a product-developer in any industry, and you feel that you know your market and your customers and your product really well, it’s can be easy to get bound up by that and put your own biases – what you think is good, what you think is bad – into it.”

So what prompted the jump? A coffee, apparently. Mr Nygren kept in touch with the company’s work with Sovereign after he moved elsewhere in the company. He heard about the job opportunity during a coffee with Optimal Usability’s general manager Shailesh Manga – soon to head to Chicago.

It must be quite a shift. Quite, yes. You could fit all of Optimal Usability’s 21 Auckland employees in a room. It might be a bit of a squeeze for Sovereign’s 800 employees.