Natalia Argüello
Head of Service Design at Zurich Insurance
Throughout her career, Natalia Argüello has established herself as a customer experience innovation leader, combining technology, business strategy, and human-centred design to create, launch, and scale digital products across global markets. She currently leads the CX and Service Design practice at Zurich Duo —Zurich Insurance's internal agency— driving initiatives to design and implement integrated customer experiences at both local and global levels. Previously, as Head of Digital Customer Experience at Zurich Spain, she led multidisciplinary teams to deliver data-driven digital platforms that aligned customer needs with business priorities.
Before joining Zurich, Natalia held leadership roles at Fjord/Accenture and other design agencies, leading large-scale innovation projects for multinational clients across Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Earlier, she was Executive Director of NYDesigns, the non-profit organisation dedicated to the success of design and hardware tech startups in New York, where she secured over $11M in funding and significantly grew the organisation’s reach. Originally from Quito, Ecuador, Natalia built her career in New York before relocating to Barcelona, where she lives with her husband and their Boston Terrier, Happy.
Natalia Argüello
Head of Service Design at Zurich Insurance
Throughout her career, Natalia Argüello has established herself as a customer experience innovation leader, combining technology, business strategy, and human-centred design to create, launch, and scale digital products across global markets. She currently leads the CX and Service Design practice at Zurich Duo —Zurich Insurance's internal agency— driving initiatives to design and implement integrated customer experiences at both local and global levels. Previously, as Head of Digital Customer Experience at Zurich Spain, she led multidisciplinary teams to deliver data-driven digital platforms that aligned customer needs with business priorities.
Before joining Zurich, Natalia held leadership roles at Fjord/Accenture and other design agencies, leading large-scale innovation projects for multinational clients across Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Earlier, she was Executive Director of NYDesigns, the non-profit organisation dedicated to the success of design and hardware tech startups in New York, where she secured over $11M in funding and significantly grew the organisation’s reach. Originally from Quito, Ecuador, Natalia built her career in New York before relocating to Barcelona, where she lives with her husband and their Boston Terrier, Happy.
Sessions
Orchestrating ecosystems at scale: the invisible work of the service design leader
In large, complex organizations, delivering transformational customer experiences goes far beyond crafting touchpoints — it’s about orchestrating ecosystems of channels, tech capabilities, and the teams behind them. It means navigating tensions, negotiating priorities, aligning diverse perspectives, and unlocking deep expertise across business units, markets, and functions.
Service design leaders today must act as organizational orchestrators and negotiators — not just designing experiences, but aligning the conditions that allow those experiences to thrive. This means helping stakeholders feel heard, surfacing shared goals, mediating competing interests, and translating complexity into clear direction.
At Zurich, this role has come to life through our work building a global integrated CX framework. Rather than enforcing a one-size-fits-all model, the framework is designed to adapt to varying levels of CX maturity and business context across markets — made possible through continuous negotiation between global strategy and local execution. Service design was key not just in crafting the framework, but in aligning teams around it, facilitating trade-offs, and making room for local realities without losing sight of shared impact.
This talk explores how visualization — of journeys, systems, governance, and decisions — becomes a strategic artifact that fuels clarity, confidence, and action. When service design is embedded at this level, it becomes a catalyst for cohesive, customer-centered transformation—even in the most fragmented environments.
Design leadership
Journeys & ecosystems