How An Internal Storyteller Fuels Member Growth At Navy Federal

For nearly 20 years, Adam Burrell has played a leading role in the digital transformation that has helped turn Navy Federal Credit Union ($194.0B, Vienna, VA) into one of the most recognized brands in personal financial services.

And it’s been an inside job.

As the cooperative’s CX/UX innovation strategist, Burrell manages a framework to track and manage creative ideas, then rapidly prototypes and validates them via the credit union’s incubator, the Exploration Studio.

He also uses his mastery of tech tools as a storyteller to show senior leaders what they need to consider adopting and why. That piece of his role includes crafting the strategic narrative for the annual planning conference and creating high-stakes board reports.

That combination of innovation and narrative sits at the center of Burrell’s work.

How do the disciplines of CX/UX innovator and storyteller intersect in your work?

Adam Burrell: I think of storytelling as sense-making architecture. The work that we do here lives at the intersection of member experience, strategic vision, and organizational capability. None of these things speak the same language naturally.

I build narrative frameworks that make complexity coherent. Not simplifying it but contextualizing it. If there’s a sophisticated technological component involved, my job is to show how it connects to member impact and competitive differentiation.

Innovation and storytelling are the same work. You can’t explore new possibilities in a vacuum, and you can’t just prototype interesting ideas and hope someone gets it. You need the narrative scaffold that helps people understand why this matters.

In practice, that means I spend a lot of time thinking about sequencing, framing, and what I call aspirational architecture — not just what we’re building but why it’s worth building and how it fits into the larger story of who Navy Federal is and where we’re taking the member experience.

What kinds of stories resonate most with senior leaders, and how do you tailor them for those audiences?

AB: Leadership responds to stories that make the stakes unmistakably clear. The ones that land best show a real member problem, the evidence behind it, and the strategic choice in front of the organization. They want to see patterns, not anecdotes, and they want to understand how a direction supports the broader North Star without getting dragged into execution detail.

When I shape stories for forums like strategic planning or board updates, I show the member moment in a way that’s concrete; I connect that moment to enterprise outcomes, feasibility signals, and the decisions leaders need to make; and I cut everything that does not influence the choice, so the narrative moves quickly from insight to implications.

What resonates most is clarity. A single problem that matters, a crisp articulation of value, and a transparent view of risks and dependencies. Senior audiences don’t need to be convinced with volume, they need to understand the trade-offs. My job is to make those explicit so they can steer with confidence.

Can you share an example of a story you’ve told that directly influenced a strategic decision?

AB: One of my favorite examples of this was an early briefing I built on mobile banking. At the time, it was new, a little abstract, and most of our senior leaders were only catching pieces of what it could mean.

The point of the presentation was straightforward. Make the technology make sense, show how it would reshape basic member expectations, and make it clear why it mattered for the credit union’s future.

I walked them through the member experience first. What a typical day looks like when you can bank from your pocket instead of your desktop. Once people could see the shift in behavior, the data and competitor moves clicked into place.

How has experience design and storytelling contributed to Navy Federal’s sustained growth and member satisfaction?

AB: One thing people sometimes miss is how much of Navy Federal’s growth story is actually an experience story. When we made our first real investments in UX, we were not chasing trends. We were trying to remove friction from everyday member moments.

Experience design and storytelling makes the invisible visible. When we show leaders what a smoother, more intuitive experience feels like for members, the data suddenly has context. Storytelling helps leaders understand why UX is a strategic lever for loyalty and growth, and it helps teams see how their work connects to real human outcomes.

In short, experience design reshaped how members interact with us. Storytelling reshaped how the organization understands and invests in that work. Together, they’ve been a quiet engine behind our sustained success.

How did your role evolve into its current form? Was storytelling always part of the job, or did it become essential as the organization grew and changed?

AB: My role has always been about helping the organization make sense of change. In the beginning, that meant gathering insights from across the enterprise, shaping strategy, and making sure people understood the decisions in front of them.

As Navy Federal grew and modernized, the landscape shifted fast. We rebuilt major parts of our technology stack. We built a serious, modern data ecosystem. We invested heavily in team member tools and capabilities. The work got bigger, more interconnected, and a lot harder to process at a glance.

That’s when storytelling moved from being helpful to essential. You cannot drive transformation just by presenting the facts. People need to understand what’s changing, why it matters, and what it means for members.

This has been especially true in our innovation practice. The stories we craft in the Exploration Studio make possibilities tangible. They connect member needs with emerging capabilities and help leaders see the opportunity. Without strong storytelling, innovation is abstract. With it, the organization can move forward.

So no, storytelling was not always a formal part of my job. But as the enterprise scaled, as our capabilities expanded, and as our ambitions grew, it became one of the most important tools I use.

Who do you report to, and how does your role fit within Navy Federal’s broader corporate structure? How does that positioning enable you to connect innovation, experience, and growth?

AB: I report to the Member Strategy Office, the part of the organization that looks across the entire membership and the entire business and asks where we need to go next. It’s where we connect the dots, not just execute them.

Within that, my team leads UX Innovation Strategy. The simplest way to describe it is that we run the Exploration Studio. That’s our virtual space for testing new ideas early, exploring emerging capabilities, and helping the organization understand what’s possible before we make big bets. We work at the front end of innovation, where the questions are still messy and the answers are not obvious yet.

Being positioned inside the MSO gives us two advantages. We can see across the enterprise, and we can operate close to the emerging opportunities. That combination allows us to translate change into clarity, connect innovation to strategy, and help the organization move forward with confidence.

What energizes you most about the work?

AB: I get to spend my time looking at how our members’ financial lives are shifting and help Navy Federal understand what that means for the future. That’s energizing.

What I love most is the moment when a story clicks. When a leader suddenly sees a member challenge or opportunity in a new way and the path forward becomes clear. Turning complexity into something human and actionable is the part of the work that feels the most meaningful to me.

What challenges you the most? What’s the biggest misconception people have about what a CX/UX innovation strategist actually does?

AB: The challenge is the pace and scale of change. Our technology, our data ecosystem, and our team member capabilities have advanced rapidly, and the decisions we make now span the entire enterprise.

My job is to create clarity without watering things down, to protect the long-term vision while still helping the organization move quickly. That tension is real, and it is part of what makes the work exciting.

The biggest misconception about UX strategy is that the work is about design trends or “doing workshops.” It’s not. The work sits right in the middle of strategy and decision-making. We frame the problems that matter, pressure test ideas early, surface risks, and tell the stories that help leaders make confident choices.

Storytelling is not a nice-to-have. It’s the way we turn data, research, and emerging capabilities into a shared understanding the organization can actually act on.

At the end of the day, what inspires me most is simple. I get to help a mission-driven organization imagine what comes next, and I get to do it in service of members who trust us with their financial lives. There’s nothing more motivating than that.

This interview has been edited and condensed.