Blake Callaghan Email & Phone Number

Auckland, New Zealand

Key responsibilities:- Responsible for the product strategy from ideation to execution. - Design thinking practices to understand customers, their needs, experiences, and then deliver products to those needs. - Deliver change at rapid pace to the business, project managing product delivery and business delivery from start to finish.- Establish, run and manage extensive product lifecycle and governance activity, from senior management to the SCPI Board. - Deeply understand and respond to competitor changes at pace.- Extensive stakeholder management internally and externally.Key Achievements: - Established product governance frameworks that are fit for purpose in the New Zealand insurance market. This allowed better decision making for product related issues with the right oversight.- Developed product strategy and roadmaps which align closely to goals and objectives for customers and the wider SCPI business. All goals for the first 2-year roadmap achieved. - Delivered major product delivery in 10 weeks from approval, leading business delivery, setting up governance frameworks and managing business wide risks and dependencies. - Lead the delivery of plain language policy wordings for pet insurance (a first in NZ) and obtaining the WriteMark standard. This enabled customers to understand their cover, and catered to those with assessability needs.- Enhanced products as needed to reduce operational complexity, meet customers’ needs and to improve relationships with key partners.- Lead research and design thinking workshops to reimagine products that target the needs of a variety of different psycho demographics.

Auckland, New Zealand

Key responsibilities:- Continuously define features, track features in development, prioritise the programme vision and backlog / roadmap across multiple business owners and executive functions in line with the company strategy.- Lead cross functional virtual delivery teams to ensure delivery and change management activities are completed.- Understand customer needs and validate solutions through a customer experience lens. - Ensure Agile Product Owners have a solid understanding of the financial and insurance market, competitor movements and future trends for systems and domains being developed. - Communicate complex and changing messages to stakeholders in relation to the agile programme of work.- Develop and scope delivery options for portfolio business cases. Estimate delivery costs for F&D and construct and accept phases based on feature requirements. Key Achievements: - Set up and owned a new position, processes and governance structures to achieve as much ‘flow’ as possible through AIA’s Agile Release Train where nothing was really defined beforehand.- Coordinated a large project portfolio, resulting in multiple Epic deliveries to market.

Auckland, New Zealand

Company change due to AIA NZ acquisition of Sovereign NZKey responsibilities:- Lead the design and implementation across the organisation for AIA NZs Vitality Integrated Product proposition and single product offering and strategy including product design, reinsurance, business rules and discounting behaviour across multiple product lines. - Leading team members and direct reports towards a common shared vision and purpose for AIA / Sovereigns product offering in an agile working environment. - Lead senior stakeholders to ensure that business objectives are met, removing roadblocks and ensuring that key priorities are delivered on time.- Lead the implementation and design of product and pricing campaigns.- Review on sale products to ensure that they remain fit for purpose and deliver partner and customer value along the lifecycle of the product.Key Achievements: - Headed and designed AIA NZ’s Vitality Integrated Product Proposition, Multi Benefit Discount pricing proposition and integrated insurance product offering, creating New Zealand's most attractive Life insurance and pricing proposition while ensuring operational efficiencies were maintained.- Continued to innovate on the Minimum Viable Product delivery, setting the priority backlog for continued improvement resulting in a clear product delivery roadmap for the next 12 months.- Redesigned existing processes and business rules across multiple business units (operations, claims, underwriting, new business) resulting in 240 business rules and processes across 3 distinct product sets being clearly and simply defined for staff to implement at launch.

Auckland, New Zealand

AIA NZ acquired Sovereign. Please refer above.

Key responsibilities:- Management of existing products.- Researching and informing of changes in the local and global industry.- Work with stakeholders to generate resolutions.- In life monitoring of products through their product lifecycle.- Product remediation implementation across the business to maintain fair outcomes for customers.Key Achievements: - Produced Sovereign’s first formal product review for a corporate partner, resulting in fundamental design changes for the product set.- Implemented a number of changes to Sovereigns health insurance, providing better customer outcomes for policy holders.

- Researching and informing of changes in the local and global industry.- In life monitoring of products through their product lifecycle.- Support Product Managers with product development and remediation- Data analysis to drive product change

Takapuna

- Effective stakeholder management- Lean 6 Sigma process improvement- Use of DMAIC process improvement cycle to keep project on track and productive- Collaborating with peers to ensure project goals are realised- Data analysis and reporting

Sovereign

- Monitor daily operations; management of workflow & people- Lead, coach and develop capability. Building a highly engaged and focused team of professionals- Exceed service, productivity and efficiency targets- Monitoring performance and progress against business plans- Identify and execute process improvement initiatives- Performance Management- Reach sound decisions and solve problems independently- Process Management - Brilliant at engineering processes necessary to get things done

Sovereign

- Handling ongoing queries daily from CSC's relating to product and system navigation queries.- Ensuring teams targets are meet by delivering training that is relevant to the business need.- Keeping staff motivated by delivering and supporting their growth in the business.- Organizing, facilitating and reporting on system and product foundation training.- Maintaining and building rapport with CSC's and managers. - Creating original training plans that are relevant, precise, and motivating for staff.- Providing on target feedback and training reports.

Sovereign

- Relationship Center team member of the year 2007- Contributed to winning the CRM insurance sector award in 2008 and 2007- Development of tools to help colleagues to answer inbound calls more effectively

Diploma Systems Engineering, Information Technology

Activities and Societies: CCNA, MCP

Education record