Kristi Flashcards
What professional achievement are you most proud of?
General theme of jumping headfirst into roles and taking a risk.
E.g. product, royal commission, reslife, Helia new product, strategy
My contribution to the enterprise transformation at ResLife.
Cover off:
- Reputation for tackling the tricky problems that are more ambiguous
- Proven capability to stand up teams quickly to deliver
Examples:
- Establishing Agile ways of working at RL (front runner)
- Currently AI strategy, ways of working, product development
For AI: We built a few Australia-first and some world-first AI models and proved they could be used in practice. And my business unit by far the most progressed and was held up as best practice.
I took a risk jumping into something new and did pretty well.
What personal achievement are you most proud of?
Two things:
- Support I’ve been able to provide my family when they’ve needed it.
- Academic achievements - first in extended family to go to uni, let alone masters degree
What culture do you prefer?
- Transparency and accountability
- Collaboration - all driving toward the same goals
- Innovative and open to trying new things - failure
- Self reflective/honest with self
Examples - RL for transparency. AMP for innovation.
What motivates you?
- I just want whatever I’m doing to be as good as it possible can
- The types of problems that I’m working on
- Execution and knowing that I’m having a positive impact on customers
How would you convince executives about the viability of a new concept or change?
Three things:
1. Data-driven
2. Evidence based (show early progress)
3. Understand stakeholder interests
Example:
When starting at Helia there was almost no focus on end customer.
I’ve made it a bit of a personal mission to change that.
1. Data: sized up the TAM of those without 20% not going to a broker. A 0.5% change in sentiment could equal x premium revenue.
2. Tested a number of narrative changes with groups of customers to demonstrate how it resonates. Real customers..
3. Stakeholders concerned about how to do it, costs involved. Mapped this out and brought in experts
How would you measure outcomes?
Agile ways of working really help with this..
Big fan of OKR’s done properly with clear alignment between strategy and activity.
Example - currently refreshing OKR process. Was also the Agile front runner at RL.
Example - setting KRs that are long term. Our govt strategy is one example. We won’t see results for some time but we’re tracking things like how often LMI is mentioned as something to be avoided in govt media
Key difference between direct and retail insurance products
- ensuring simplicity and that customers have all information they need.
- Lapse rates. More focus on retention
- commercials - more significant acquisition cost (focus on minimising)
- reliance on strategic relationships and focus on winning tenders
What was the most challenging task in your career so far? What did you learn from it?
Royal Commission. Not the most tricky individual task but the most challenging extended period of time due to: Family and friends didn’t understand and saw the media
I learnt:
- I’m extremely resilient and do well in very challenging situations. Tend to be relied upon as a “rock” and “unflappable”
- As you’re probably aware, a many of the issues were related to poor design and poor controls, a lot of bandaids on legacy systems and no investment in simplification. I definitely have a heightened sense of unintended customer impacts form these decision and from debt (tech, process, decision).
- Learnt about complex adaptive systems and how a machine like AMP responds in a Chaotic paradigm. Didn’t have a name for it then but have since found Dave Snowden’s cynefin framework. Specifically in Chaos, you should act, sense and respond. You don’t have time to plan.
What’s the biggest set-back you’ve faced?
Two examples and the consistent theme is managing expectations and motivation of the team.
One that comes to mind is deploying AI in a legacy business resulted in frequent setbacks and a lot of putting out fires.
Data wasn’t reliable, or available, and was being separated from AMP at the same time. This resulted in frequent delays and managing expectations.
I also had the issue of conflicting stakeholder interests, resulting in poor decisions about vendors which were critical in some failures.
Lesson was that more time needed to be spent collaborating across the business and ensuring priorities were aligned.
Second is when the RC started, capital needed to be redirected and my expertise was needed elsewhere. Stopped deployment of our direct product then.
How do you help underperforming team members?
It depends on why they’re underperforming, so the first step is to identify that.
- Personal issue: discuss and provide support where we can.
- Capability related: can we have more training support or a buddy.
- Capacity related. Can we divert tasks.
It’s also important to make a call quickly about whether the role is just wrong for that particular person.
Example: Rebecca, I dragged it out because I persisted with capability uplift for too long and it impacted the rest of the team.
I started from a position of wanting to help and uplift everyone, I then swung the other way and really focused on poor performance. Now I’m at a happy medium.
What is the most difficult or annoying thing your leader can do?
A leader will quickly lose my trust if they don’t do what they say they’re going to do, or they don’t communicate things that are critical to performing my job.
I also expect them to trust me with information and enable me to do my job.
Tell us about how you deal with taking on existing teams?
- When I started managing teams I probably had the tendency come in like a tornado. I’ve learnt to take the time to listen and understand before making any significant changes
- I have stepped into many roles and dealt with a lot of senior stakeholders where the need to prove my capability has been strong, but I’ve always managed to.
- I also know that I can’t be an expert in everything, which is a good thing, so identifying early who you need to rely on.
Tell us about a time when you’ve experimented to achieve an outcome
The key to successfully building the right product or service is incrementally testing and iterating. I’m a big believer in small, purposeful experiments. What’s the smallest deliverable that will give results.
NEW EXAMPLE: NAMING OF LMI
One example is as part of the Claims transformation we wanted to identify firstly which claims to STP vs paying extra attention to because they could be more variable, and then which claims would respond to different types of rehab.
We built many pilot machine learning models and created specific experiments to determine the best approach before even starting a scaled build on the ML platform.
We found a few things:
- It was really important to direct claims to the right case manager - it had a huge impact on the outcome (something like 30%). Someone skilled in RTW wasn’t necessarily good at negotiating a settlement. So an important part of scaling was identifying skillsets.
- The most important data to determine claim outcome was actually bio-psycho-social. So for the rehabilitation AI model, there was no point in investing in a big build until we’d found a way to get that data.
Summary: we saved a lot of time and investment by experimenting early and building iteratively, and also got much better claims outcomes.
What are some prioritisation methods you use?
Key is having clear business objectives and cascading key results aligned to the strategy.
Value focus.
If you set and communicate those at the business level, the business unit level and the squad level, it’s a lot easier to build your roadmap and prioritise your delivery.
Some specific frameworks I have used:
- 2x2’s with metrics such as value/impact, customer satisfaction, time taken/effort, investment required, immediacy of impact
- MoSCoW
- Feasibility, Desirability and Viability
Example:
As part of developing our AI strategy I’ve had to explore the universe of possibilities and whittle it down to what do we need to act on immediately, what should we build a plan for and what should we having a watching brief on. I did this through identifying impact and time to impact.
Tell us about working with people whose ideas differ from yours.
I am a bit of a fish out of water at H. I’m significantly more forward looking and I’m working with a few people who have been at an LMI provider for 20+ years. There’s a lot of push back on trying new things. So I consider what their interests might be and what’s creating the pushback.
Example:
- I’ve been trying to start bringing in strategic execution software. I’m getting a bit of pushback from the person running PMO in tech ops, who look after our contracts
- While they’re good at tracking activity through JIRA and Confluence, they haven’t had any focus previously on outcomes. It’s a new level of transparency
- I’m sitting with her to go through the current state, and explain how I see the future working and taking her feedback on board.
Understanding that it’s scary but we’re going to do it anyway.
Tell us an interesting fact about yourself.
- I love doing extreme activities.
- Something that’s contributed a lot to who I am is that half my family is deaf - my mum and my brother. I’ve been very independent from a very young age and also have always taken more of a leadership role speaking for and organising my family a lot.
What are your strengths?
- Influence and communicate the vision - getting buy-in through clearly articulating the value of each deliverable. A lot of experience doing this at senior levels.
- Guiding others to step up - make data-driven decisions, understand value drivers, putting frameworks in place for others to execute and then trusting my teams.
- Interconnected thinking - seeing the big pictures and connecting dots. Responding to evolving market dynamics and challenging others to anticipate the wider impact
What are your weaknesses?
- Impatient with process for processes sake. I recently attending a 4 hour ERMC meeting with a 100 page pre-read of memos that were all bespoke. At RL had a 400 page process for assessing a death claim.
- Overly ambitious with what can be achieved in short timeframes. Positive: bias to optimism. Becomes more of a problem when I convince my team of their abilities too and someone needs to be the voice of reason.
How will you deal with your lack of Direct insurance experience
- Tender process management. Been involved in group insurance tenders at AMP, have managed partner products (e.g.through IAG). Biggest tender was actually AMP’s largest ever outsource provider (Deloitte) for the FFNS remediation project. Will need to develop muscle in this space. Currently tendering for CBA’s LMI business (again).
I’ll tackle them through:
1. Knowing what I don’t know and who does.
2. My ability to get up to speed quickly. Have done this throughout my career. I tend to just dive in and figure it out, determine who I need to lean out. Examples: Rewriting the corporate strategy for LMI. Developing AI strategies. Led the claims business unit.
- Have also worked with several direct products as investor (reverse mortgage and deposit gap loans), including getting a number of partnerships in place (e.g. AMP Bank)
