Sr. Director, Life Product Innovation Design

Come join one of America’s fastest-growing insurance companies. Since 1848, National Life Group has aimed to keep our promises, providing families with stability in good times and in bad. Throughout that history, we have provided peace of mind to those families as they plan their futures.

Our mission extends beyond the insurance and annuities policies that we offer. We strive to make the world a better place through our grants from our charitable foundation, paid volunteer time for our employees, environmentally sustainable and healthy workplaces, and events that promote the work of nonprofits in our own backyard.

We foster a collaborative environment with opportunities for growth and encourage our associates to live our values:

Do good. Be good. Make good.

Please note that we do not offer visa sponsorship for this position.

Role Summary

The Senior Director, Life Product Innovation & Design leads the strategy, innovation agenda, and product design capabilities for the Life Product portfolio. This role translates customer, distributor, competitive, market, regulatory, and emerging technology insights into differentiated product opportunities that support enterprise growth objectives.

The Senior Director partners with Distribution and Marketing to prioritize opportunities, and facilitates the structure and governance needed to move concepts from market insight and ideation through early-stage design and validation.

This role serves as the primary bridge between the field and internal product stakeholders, leading product concept development and ensuring effective processes, decision forums, communication mechanisms, and accountability across the product innovation pipeline to improve speed to market and clarity of execution.

The ideal candidate combines deep knowledge of the Individual Life insurance marketplace with strong strategic judgment, commercial orientation, executive presence, and the ability to influence across organizational boundaries. This leader operates effectively in ambiguity, translates complex market signals into actionable product strategies and design decisions, and leads supporting product resources and select third-party relationships with a strong P&L ownership mindset.

This position currently offers an onsite work schedule, with the expectation that you will be in the office four (4) days per week during onsite core days.  Our current onsite core days are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  The work schedule type and core days are subject to change with advance notification and manager discretion.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Partner with Distribution and Marketing to define and execute the strategic vision and innovation agenda for the Life Product portfolio, aligning product opportunities with enterprise growth priorities, customer needs, distribution strategy, and competitive market dynamics.

Help define and execute the front-end of the Life Product Lifecycle, ensuring a disciplined process for identifying, evaluating, designing, and validating new product and product enhancement opportunities.

Translate voice-of-customer, voice-of-distributor, competitive intelligence, market trends, regulatory developments, emerging technologies, and business performance data into actionable product opportunities and recommendations.

Maintain a deep understanding of the Life Insurance marketplace, including product structures, competitive value propositions, distribution practices, technology capabilities, customer expectations, and applicable regulatory, tax, and compliance considerations.

Partner with key internal stakeholders to effectively drive product design and concept development, including product positioning, target market definition, customer value proposition, feature design, and any field testing, ensuring alignment with strategic objectives and operational capabilities.

Partner with Product Initiative Leads, Senior Pricing Actuaries, Marketing, and others to ensure the upfront design strategy is understood and carried forward to the implementation process.

Serve as a senior product thought partner to distribution and field leadership, actively engaging with financial professionals and key internal stakeholders to understand unmet needs, evaluate concepts.

Partner with the marketing team to ensure effective market sizing and opportunity assessment for product concepts, leveraging internal and external data to inform investment decisions, prioritization, and product strategy.

Develop and maintain portfolio-level product innovation roadmaps, staging maps, calendars, and executive communication mechanisms that provide transparency into priorities, progress, decisions, risks, and emerging opportunities.

Establish and continuously improve innovation practices that encourage experimentation, rapid prototyping, market testing, learning, and disciplined progression from concept to development.

Identify opportunities to improve product development processes and reduce time to market in support of enterprise growth objectives.

Lead and develop supporting product resources, establishing clear priorities, expectations, and development opportunities, with an eye towards maximizing impact and influence on Life Product efforts.

Provide senior leadership with clear recommendations, tradeoffs, and decisions on emerging product opportunities and design choices.

Champion a customer- and distributor-centered approach to product innovation and design, ensuring that product concepts address meaningful needs and can be effectively positioned and supported in the marketplace.

All other duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
• 10 or more years of related experience.
• Deep knowledge of the Individual Life insurance marketplace, including products, use-cases, distribution practices, and competitive landscape.
• Demonstrated leadership in product strategy, innovation, or product design.
• Experience leading complex, cross-functional initiatives involving multiple business functions and stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to influence, communicate with, and build relationships across senior stakeholders.
• People leadership experience, including setting priorities, providing direction, and developing talent.
• AI Proficiency Expectations: At National Life Group, we view AI as an enabler of human potential. We use AI to help us work smarter, serve more clients, and keep our promises, while remaining a relationship-driven business where our people are our greatest strength.
• All applicants are expected to: Leverage approved AI tools, where appropriate, to improve the efficiency, quality, and impact of their work.
• Stay curious and open to new AI-enabled ways of working.
• Exercise sound judgment by reviewing and validating AI-generated content.
• Maintain accountability for the accuracy, quality, fairness, and integrity of work products by adhering to National Life's AI guiding principles.
• Use AI responsibly and in accordance with company policies related to confidentiality, data privacy, security, compliance, retention, and intellectual property.
• Additional Expectations for AI-Forward Roles
• Applicants in AI-forward roles are also expected to: Identify practical opportunities to apply AI to improve workflows, productivity, analysis, and business outcomes.
• Create effective prompts, workflows, controls, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) review processes that support responsible AI use.
• Critically evaluate AI-generated outputs for accuracy, quality, bias, fairness, confidentiality, compliance, security, and business relevance.
• Partner appropriately with Legal, Compliance, Risk, Security, Data/Technology, and business stakeholders to move AI ideas from experimentation to responsible adoption.
• Help model responsible, human-centered AI adoption across the organization.
• Core Competencies
• Cultivates Innovation**
• Fosters innovation by taking calculated risks; Work cooperatively with others to produce innovative solutions.
• Ensures Accountability**
• Holds self and others accountable to meet commitments and performance goals.
• Directs Work**
• Provides direction, delegates, and removes obstacles to get work done.
• Demonstrates Emotional Intelligence**
• Exhibits the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions and how emotions can influence others; Uses a combination of feedback and reflection to gain productive insight into personal strengths and opportunities.
• Exhibits Critical and Creative Thinking**
• Engaging thinking skills that focus on logic and reasoning to make decisions (critical) and innovative solutions to solve problems (creative).
• Leads Change**
• Facilitates change and transition at the individual and team level; Develops strategic goals for aligning with change.
• Develops Talent**
• Builds team(s) equipped for the future by applying coaching techniques for developing team members to meet their professional/personal goals and the organizational goals; Listens and responds with empathy; Asks thought provoking questions.
• Inspires Others**
• Motivates and influences others by creating an environment where teams can do their best work; Partners across the organization to achieve results.