Making pay make sense for 8,000 advisors

Northwestern Mutual’s 8,000+ financial advisors are paid entirely on commission, across 120+ programs and more than 10 disconnected systems. No one could see the whole picture of what they earned or why. I led a year of discovery: 24 interviews with advisors and their CFOs, 1,000+ insights, and a survey that let the field rank its own priorities. That produced design principles, a single system with views for advisors, leaders and the home office, and a shared experience vision. With product leadership, we pitched the highest-impact pieces to the business owners, and they adopted them into the roadmap. The first release, Minimum Earnings, saves an estimated 1,750 hours a year.

When your paycheck is a puzzle

Northwestern Mutual sells only through its independent financial advisors, known internally as “the Field.” Their pay is 100% commission. It varies by product, by production, and over time, and it’s spread across bonuses, allowances, recognition programs, benefits and taxes.

For an advisor building a business, that pay is the business. But the information lived in more than 10 systems with little connection between them. Advisors couldn’t easily answer basic questions: What am I earning? What bonus am I close to? What happens if I hit my next goal?

Meanwhile, the teams serving them kept shipping one-off fixes, often tacked onto legacy systems, with no shared picture of where the experience was headed. Every fix added one more place to look.

Listening at scale

I tied the work to the goals leadership already tracked (the size of the Field, advisor revenue, the diversity of the Field, and financial plans per household), then led the research. Our Field Engagement team was essential: they identified advisors and got them on the calendar.

• A full system inventory mapped where every piece of an advisor’s pay actually lived.
• 17 interviews with advisors (30 minutes each) and 7 with their CFOs (60 minutes each) covered commissions, allowances, recognition, bonuses and taxes.
• More than 1,000 insights, which my team and I worked through together in synthesis workshops

Four decisions that shaped the vision

1. Let the Field rank its own problems

With 1,000+ insights, the risk was that stakeholders, or we as designers, would pick favorites. Instead, we grouped the insights into themes and asked advisors to rank them in a survey:

• A complete view of contract value came first for 47.5%.
• Understanding revenue, expenses and taxes came first for 31.1%.
• Visibility into bonuses came first for 18.0%.

That ranking became the backbone of the roadmap, and it made our priorities easy to defend.

2. Set principles before screens

The same insights produced four principles that every later decision was measured against:

• Create a unified experience.
• Present actionable information.
• Make rewards easy to understand.
• Show long-term impact.

The themes said what to fix, and the principles said how.

3. Stop building one-off fixes

This was the decision that mattered most. Instead of patching another legacy system, I proposed a single Field Rewards platform:

• Three views on one set of data: advisors, field leaders and the home office each see what they need.
• Built into the platform advisors already use daily (NMXP), not added as another destination
• The interface kept separate from the data, connected through APIs, so the experience could evolve without rebuilding the systems underneath

It also changed things for our development partners. Once they knew new work would land on one platform rather than being bolted onto old ones, they could plan and build with far more clarity.

4. Show the future instead of describing it

Across about five workshops, my team and I worked through the themes and sketched solutions. From those, I designed vision concepts: short stories that follow one advisor through her day.

• Checking a compensation summary across pay periods
• Seeing her progress toward every bonus she qualifies for
• Learning how a program works at the moment she needs it
• Resolving minimum-earnings issues with the home office in real time

The concepts gave product, engineering and leadership the same picture to react to.

From vision to roadmap

With our product partner, we took the vision to the Field Rewards business owners, the program managers responsible for advisor pay and benefits. We asked them to prioritize the three pieces with the most impact:

• Minimum Earnings
• Earnings dashboards
• A benefits overview and progress tracker

They adopted those asks into the product roadmap, which then shipped in stages:

• Minimum Earnings (2023): turned a year-end paperwork process into a shared, daily view. It saves an estimated 1,750 hours a year.
• Field Compensation Dashboard (2024): gave 8,000+ advisors insight into 120+ compensation programs.
• Field Management Dashboard (2025): gave field leaders a view into their own and their team’s compensation.

I left Northwestern Mutual in October 2023. The 2024 and 2025 releases were built by the team after my departure, from this vision and these principles.

What I took away

Evidence makes a vision defensible. Letting advisors rank their own priorities turned a design opinion into a business case.

One platform is a gift to engineering, not just to users. The biggest change was giving our development partners one clear place to build.

Bring the decision-makers in earlier. If I did it again, I’d invite the business owners into the ideation workshops, not just the final pitch. We’d likely have won even more of the roadmap, and it would have built the relationship sooner.