Cindy McKissock is a strategic and visionary Design and Product Executive with a proven track record in design, product strategy, and technology for financial services. She is known for her customer-first mindset, building exceptional teams, empathetic leadership, establishing new capabilities, and driving innovation.
As VP of Design at Fannie Mae, she was the company's head of design, reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer. She delivered the first corporate design strategy and vision and founded the enterprise design team responsible for increasing customer satisfaction and innovation through design. She applied human-centered design to agile product and business development across all customer journeys for all divisions. She scaled the team across multiple geographic locations from 0 to 100 designers in 18 months, establishing core design capabilities (service design, UI/UX, visual design, content strategy, design-led research, and design thinking education), resulting in measurable improvements in NPS, product adoption, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction as well as a broad corporate embrace of human-centered design.
Cindy also managed strategic partnerships with fintech, business, and technology teams to drive the adoption of design, advance innovation, and deliver multiple prize-winning SaaS products and an innovation roadmap for the company. In addition, she established the design operations team and had the first enterprise design system, design technology stack, user lab, user personas, and customer journeys. This improved corporate strategic alignment uncovered multiple improvement opportunities and increased operational efficiency.
With a Master of Science in Information Systems Technology from The George Washington University School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia, Cindy completed Executive Development Programs at MIT Sloan Executive Education, Harvard Business School, and UCLA Anderson School of Management. Additionally, she completed a Design Thinking Bootcamp at Stanford University d.school Executive Education.
Forrester, Loyalty 360, and the American Business Awards have recognized Cindy's work. She is team-oriented and focused on talent development and strong partnerships. She is excited to connect with and learn from other professionals in the design and product fields.