About Me
Christine Walker, Creative & Experience Design Leader
Strategic design leader with 10+ years building and scaling design functions within complex enterprises, regulated financial institutions, and startup environments. Certified in CX and UX leadership with a track record spanning visual design, design research, design strategy, digital product experience, and innovation.
Proven ability to establish operational and governance foundations in maturing design functions within complex organizations, lead federated and centralized multidisciplinary teams delivering experiences for hundreds of thousands of users, and drive cross-functional alignment across product, engineering, and senior leadership.
I’m a strategic design leader passionate about moving companies toward human-centered omnichannel experiences. I believe a better experience means better business.
Throughout my extensive career, I’ve had a broad background building and shaping experiences and design programs for small startups to Fortune 500 organizations. I’ve been honored with multiple forms of industry recognition for my design work, have spoken and taught at business and collegiate levels about design, and have mentored many startups regarding their brand and user experiences.
Scaling + Maturing
→ Developed team governance framework that was piloted to mature and advance an enterprise-wide journey-led transformation initiative. This initiative ultimately informed and led to a Customer Experience Center of Excellence, intended to foster a culture of acceptance among executive leadership around a customer-first culture.
→ Implement design team operations (DesignOps) to optimize design processes, tools, and workflows. This led to improved collaboration and communication among the team and business partners, increased efficiency and productivity of design delivery which reduced overall design debt, better quarterly visibility into design operations and performance, and adoption of processes among an enterprise-wide design capability.
Driving Business Impact
→ Led money movement mobile-first product design revamp for 200,000 business banking users.
→ Established MVP Voice of Customer (VoC) capability, which resulted in improved CSAT response rates by 3% and the benchmark of an enterprise-wide NPS metric.
→ Led a company-wide rebranding initiative that increased customer acquisition rates beyond 130% among various customer segments.
→ Co-led an innovation initiative that led to the launch of a new direct-to-consumer fintech app for 300,000+ direct-to-consumer international users.
Influencing Strategy
→ Partnered with product, engineering, and executive sponsorship to define the strategic direction and launch of the online and mobile experience on behalf of a 200,000 user base for a top 20 US bank.
→ Championed various design strategy and branding initiatives that uncovered customer insights and led to 5 successful new startup launches. Industries included energy, health & wellness, agriculture, fintech, and more.
Cross-Functional Leadership
→ Defined new design capability KPIs to measure success within business division that aligned with business partner goals, introducing new design outcome reports to cross-functional leadership on a quarterly basis.
→ Co-championed cross-functional digital delivery best practices that improved collaboration between design, product, and engineering focused within multiple enterprise based lines of business.
About Me, Personally
- I’m a wife to a sweet southern man named Ashley and we’re owners to a sweet cat named Cricket.
- I’m a sucker for all things handmade. I love make tactile things like macrame, beauty products, pottery, foods. I will also purchase at least one item at each maker festival I attend. My collection of handmade earrings is pretty ridiculous.
- I’m a perfectionist and a completionist by nature. I once completed a 1000 piece puzzle in two days because I seriously could not stop myself. I haven’t worked on a puzzle since.
- I’m very much an introvert and frequently leave large parties with a sweeping wave and “goodbye everyone” in place of individual goodbyes.
- I was lucky to be exposed to many different cultures at a young age because of my grandparents, who were involved in various community exchange based programs. Every holiday was graced by young and old adults from countries across the world. Those experiences shaped the trajectory of my life in many ways, including having a genuine appreciation for different backgrounds and points of view.
- I love being outdoors because it grounds me mentally and emotionally. My husband and I love to hike and travel. So far, we’ve been to 10+ countries and counting!
