I believe creating excellent experiences means creating excellent teams, and letting them do their best work.

🏦 Where I am now

I am Head of Design for Personal Banking at NAB, and I lead the bank’s Product Design Practice.

I look after the three full stack product design teams behind NAB’s Personal Banking offerings. From a simple transaction account all the way through to a home loan, I am responsible for designing the customer experience across every touch point we have, digital or otherwise.

Day to day, that means leading the design strategy, creative direction and execution of a genuinely exciting new future for NAB’s products. Our customers now reach us through agentic platforms as well as traditional channels, and my job is to make sure the experience and the quality of service hold up across every product we offer and every way people choose to bank with us.

I also maintain oversight of NAB’s product design craft. My focus there is on moving the bank’s design practice into a new age of AI tools without losing the craft that makes our experiences feel considered. We work closely with our enterprise partners, Figma in particular, to push our tools and our skills as far as they will go.

A few colleagues and I were interviewed and featured on Figma’s own website for the way we use their tools, a global first.

Read the Figma feature: Design once, reuse everywhere

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🧩 Redesigning how a bank designs

Before Personal Banking, I was Head of Design for Enterprise Onboarding at NAB, leading a team of over 20 people through the humbling task of redesigning and unifying every onboarding experience in the bank, one of the most important interactions we have with a customer.

Alongside that I led NAB’s product design practice, improving the design capability of a team of over 200 designers.

In that time I fundamentally changed the way NAB designs. We extended atomic design principles into new ways of working and saved millions through genuine re-use, by building intuitively designed, market leading ecosystems. I partnered directly with Figma’s global team to push their tools as far as they would go, and we leaned hard on AI tools like Cursor and Make to streamline the process.

I also led the initial creative, strategy, build and implementation of NAB’s new design system: consistency for our customers, and re-use and ease of implementation for our design and development teams. The results in market have been unprecedented.

In short: I make sure the team can move fast, and focus on working smarter, not harder.

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🌱 A detour to Up

In 2023 I spent time as Head of Digital Community Bank, working directly for the CEOs of Up and Bendigo Bank.

I was responsible for creating the next business venture for Ferocia and the Bendigo group: an ESG challenger intended to shape the future of social impact in Australia. Through a mix of excellence in technology and genuinely desirable products, I built a commercially viable venture that puts community building and social impact into the Australian zeitgeist.

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🚀 Innovation at scale

Before that, I was Associate Director, Innovation in NAB’s Group Strategy & Innovation team.

I led a multi-disciplinary incubation team across Australia and New Zealand, working with global scale partners to rapidly build and test next generation capabilities in market, with real customers. I ran the full product development cycle, from customer research and product ideation through to build and delivery.

My team set the direction for emerging technologies like Open Banking, by example and in market, for the whole NAB group (NAB, BNZ, 86 400 and UBank), reporting regularly back into the NAB Executive Leadership team.

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✈️ My earlier years at NAB

I was approached by my future mentor Todd Copeland (someone I really admire, who now runs digital at TD Bank in Canada) to apply my skills in building start-ups inside large businesses, shake things up, and create an innovative team inside NAB.

In those first years I worked closely with the CEOs of both NAB and Visa and helped found the Visa Innovation Stream. Working across Melbourne, San Francisco and Singapore with global partners including Apple, Afterpay, CIBC, Google, Vice, Clemenger, Visa, AKQA and Fjord, we built a “Continuous Innovation Stream” to co-design experiences with hundreds of individual customers.

Some of what came out of that:

• NAB Pay, our digital wallet: winner of the 2017 CANSTAR Innovation Excellence Award, and working directly with Apple on the launch of Apple Pay
• NAB StraightUp Card: Australia’s first interest free credit card, bridging the gap between traditional credit and the buy now pay later generation. It went on to represent a major share of credit card applications in its first year
• NAB’s Travel Experience: a hyper personalised travel mode for the whole NAB app
• Co-design of Visa Instalments, a global challenger to Afterpay
• NAB Life Moments, needs-based marketing translated into financial advice in a tone of voice younger customers actually understand
• Quantitative testing with over two million customers

I was also one of three founding members of NAB’s design practice, scaling our human centred design capability from 3 people to around 150 in just over three years.

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👨‍🎨 Building products and teams at JB Hi-Fi

After a brief stint out on my own servicing a few clients, mainly AAPT, I got a call from the CTO of JB Hi-Fi. Together we built Australian competitors to the international rise of Netflix, iTunes and Spotify.

I spent three and a half years building a start-up culture inside JB and managed to build a great team. I was responsible for the strategy and direction of JB’s digital NOW brand. We partnered with the core JB brand to launch quickly, learn from our customers, and iterate constantly. One proud example: being asked by Apple to stop submitting so many updates to the App Store.

Our JB Hi-Fi NOW Music offering launched with no above the line marketing and organic traffic only. I was passionate about a tailored, customised experience, with contextual playlists and marketing based on your listening habits and a focus on Australian music. Through a great customer experience and constant updates from user feedback, we became the number two streaming service in Australia, outlasting MOG and Rdio. We were nominated for an ARIA award against Apple, and won a Choice award for Australia’s best music streaming service against Spotify. A hugely proud moment for us.

Following this I was asked to expand NOW into an umbrella brand across three new offerings and markets. We saw excellent growth in the rental model, and became the first global partner with the US-based UltraViolet initiative. We also partnered with Australian publishers to create an eBook marketplace to rival Amazon.

With leading products in market, and Microsoft’s Xbox and Sonos launching with NOW Music as their default streaming app, I was asked to apply these learnings to the wider brand. In my last year at JB I consulted the board on their entire digital strategy: analytics and ML-based sales, how to digitise and increase sales in future retail stores, and a complete UX overview of the online store.

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👶 My early years

I started my career at a local agency called Wellcom at the beginning of 2006. Initially I managed the photography studio, but I quickly followed my passion for creative and helped found the centralised creative function as 2IC.

I was lucky enough to learn the ropes of advertising under the mentorship of Ron Mather, former chairman of Clemenger, and the business side of things from Christine Barnes, former MD of TBWA and DraftFCB.

I spent nearly five years leading Wellcom’s digital efforts. I was responsible for creating their web and app department, winning the digital business of global brands like Pacific Brands, BP, Citroën and Superdry, and working with them through the whole process, from consulting to media buying to creative campaign development, then the build and measurement of campaign ROI.

That department grew to the point where the agency acquired a web development business to service our clients.

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⚡️👨‍🎤 In my spare time

I am hugely passionate about entertainment and get to as many festivals, gigs and movies as I possibly can.

I have a healthy thirst for knowledge and believe firmly that you can never know enough about anything. I like to understand all the tools I use, so you can often find me studying behavioural psychology and how it translates to user experience. I’m a massive LukeW and Nielsen Norman Group fanboy.

That same thirst has led me to learn a lot of coding languages, how to build websites like this one, and how to build apps. I combined my passion for entertainment and design to build HYPE, an app I designed and coded myself, and launched on the App Store. I’m always open to feedback and would love to hear what you think.

Right now most of my spare time goes into agentic development. I am a heavy user of Claude, and I spend a lot of evenings designing and building with agents rather than just reading about them, everything from this very website through to small tools I only ever build for myself. It has genuinely changed how I think about the craft, and a lot of what I learn at home ends up shaping how I lead design at work.

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🙋‍♂️ Thank you for reading!

Get in touch: daniellancefisher@gmail.com · LinkedIn