In this episode of The Aligned Leader, I interview Monica Hernandez, Senior IT Communications and Innovation Consultant at Swiss Re, on why Data, Agility and Customer Centricity are key to making digital products and services succeed.
We discuss how important transparency and managing expectations are in dealing with different stakeholder groups.
We also discuss the fine line between users liking a product and users loving a product and why crossing this line is so important.
Watch the full interview below.
About Monica Hernandez
Monica Hernandez holds a Master in International Management from IE Business School and a B.Sc. + M.Sc. in Marketing and Communications.
She started working at a very young age and her passion for communications, people’s behaviours and technology, led her to be involved in the centre of various digital transformation initiatives within regional and multinational companies of diverse industries: mass media, brewing, culture & art, research & innovation, e-commerce, and now reinsurance.
In 2017, she joined the headquarters of Swiss Re in Zürich, to form part of the digital workplace transformation initiative that was about to start at the time. Since then, she has been able to design and support communications and change management strategies to move from legacy IT to the Cloud. In addition, she was part of one of the first teams in the company that started with an agile transformation and now she’s excited to experience from first row, how one of the biggest multinational companies in the reinsurance industry transforms.
Before that, in 2015, she joined Amazon, where she worked with top Spanish sellers to help them scale their business across all Europe by leveraging Amazon’s logistic and customer services. She got to experience and to advice how to transform brick and mortar retail operations into digital ones to leverage a European e-commerce emerging market, at the time. In addition, she learned about the power of data and customer experience to make smart business decisions.
In 2011, motivated by the impact of technology in various industries, she moved to Madrid to study a Master in International Management with a Digital Business specialization. In 2012, she joined a Spanish consultancy firm to work for Research & Innovation projects founded by the ICT division of the European Commission. In there, she worked closely with start-ups, research centres, universities, and government institutions to design communication and market entry strategies of various technology products, services and applications ready to be marketed in Europe.
It was back in 2007, when she got to experience the transition from film cameras to digital ones and the integration of social media in mass media and marketing campaigns while working in the largest media group of her native country, El Salvador. In 2010 she joined AB InBev (at the time SABMiller) where she experienced the impact that new communication channels and tools had in mass marketing campaigns and the introduction of real-time data to assess their effectiveness.
Today, to share her experience and following her passion for communications, people’s behaviours and technology; Monica has her own consultancy start-up by the side where she provides advice, and continues to specialize, in topics like digital transformation, e-commerce, human-centred design, design thinking, innovation, change management, and customer experience.