What Do You Actually Do? Customer Strategy, Nadi and the Thread Between Them.
“What do you actually do?”
I get asked this a lot, and fair enough. I do not really fit neatly into one box anymore.
Since leaving Standard Life, my work has split across two things. They look slightly different on the surface, but they are closely connected underneath. So for anyone who has wondered (or been too polite to ask), here is the honest answer.
Consulting and contracting in financial services
The first is customer strategy and proposition work in financial services. In practice, that has looked like a customer vulnerability market analysis. Defining a provider's social impact strategy. Turning customer research into personas that firms actually use, rather than ones that live in a slide deck nobody opens again. And writing white papers and frameworks, aligned to Consumer Duty, on how to make sure products and propositions genuinely work for all customers.
I have also been launching customer-focused initiatives in other sectors, which has been super cool. Customers are customers, whatever the industry, and seeing that up close has been a real gift.
Building Nadi
The second is Nadi. What started as a faint idea for a calendar tool to help women plan around their menstrual cycle has grown into something much bigger than I first imagined.
There are now cycle awareness sessions with groups, one-to-one work, and a workplace scorecard for organisations that want to better support women at work. And the tool itself is now live in beta, with real women using it.
I also do some advisory work. I sit on the Board of the Fihri Foundation, which keeps me close to the mission side of women's health, and this year we expanded into the UAE. Yey!
The thread running through all of it
On paper this can look like a few different careers stitched together. In reality there is a very real thread through it: how real people experience complex systems, whether that is a financial product, access to a service or understanding their own body, and how we design things that work better in real life.
The two halves feed each other. Consulting keeps me close to the realities teams are navigating, the constraints and trade-offs that rarely make it into the strategy deck. Building keeps me grounded in customers' lived experience, and in how to create and work at pace in the era of AI. I would be a worse consultant without Nadi, and a worse founder without the consulting.
The best part
The best part, though, is the people. I get to work with ambitious, driven people who really care about what they do and what it means to other humans (sometimes also known as customers).
I would love to say this was all perfectly planned. Alas, it has been a wild journey of feeling my way through. There have been amazing clients, days where all I wished for was the structure and clarity of full-time corporate life, and other days where I dance across the room because I am so excited about what I get to do. Life is a rollercoaster, as once prophesied by the one and only Ronan Keating.
If you are one of those people who cares about how customers actually experience what you build, I always love finding more of you. Book a 30-minute intro call and tell me what you are working on.