Long before Rhiannon Naslund had a chief marketing officer's title, she had a job in which imprecision was an expensive habit. Her first listed role was as a clinical dietitian at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Then she moved to Mead Johnson Nutrition, first selling medical products and later teaching other salespeople how to do the same. The sequence is not the standard opening of a software executive's biography. It may be the most useful part of hers.
A practitioner learns the problem from inside the room. A salesperson learns the questions people ask when money and professional judgment are involved. A trainer learns which explanation survives contact with a busy audience. Naslund collected those perspectives before she ever became responsible for a corporate brand. By the time her career shifted decisively into marketing, she had already spent years watching how information travels from a product to the person expected to trust it.
Today she is Chief Marketing Officer at Origami Risk, the Chicago software company whose products organize claims, policies, safety programs, compliance work and risk data. It is a category with enough initials to furnish a small alphabet. Her task includes making it interesting, but the harder work is making a large, technical platform intelligible to buyers who must live with the consequences of choosing it.
The apprenticeship was the point
Naslund joined Mead Johnson in 2006 as a medical sales representative. Over roughly nine years she moved through sales training, associate marketing and global marketing roles. That progression reads like a practical education in how a product story changes at different distances. Across a desk, the question is immediate: does this solve my problem? In a training room, it becomes repeatable: can another person explain the answer? At global scale, the story must remain coherent without pretending every market is the same.
While working through that progression, she added an MBA at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Her LinkedIn profile dates the program to 2013 and 2014. The degree did not interrupt the apprenticeship; it sat inside it. Soon afterward, she went to Leica Microsystems, where her public work history includes senior marketing responsibility in the Americas and, later, leadership of the microsurgery business. The marketer was now close enough to product to carry a line-of-business title.
Clinical dietetics at Cook County Hospital
Four successive disciplines at Mead Johnson Nutrition
Americas marketing and microsurgery at Leica Microsystems
Kalderos, a peer-advisor assignment, then Origami Risk
This is where a résumé can mislead. Read quickly, the industries appear to jump: nutrition, medical equipment, drug-discount data, risk software. Read for method, and the line is straight. Each market is specialized. Each product asks customers to put faith in a system they cannot judge by a cheerful slogan alone. The marketer has to respect complexity while refusing to hide behind it.
A first CMO job in a many-sided market
In 2020, Naslund joined Kalderos, a Chicago data and analytics company working in drug-discount administration. She began as vice president of brand and marketing. Two years later, the company promoted her to become its first CMO. The announcement credited her with building sales pipeline and asked her to guide the whole marketing program: brand, growth, customer engagement and communication among manufacturers, providers, payers, pharmacies and policy audiences.
A many-sided market creates a peculiar writing problem. Every participant has its own vocabulary and incentive. Speak only to one and the others hear a sales pitch written at their expense. Naslund's public language at Kalderos returned to cooperation. In a 2023 article, she argued that visible conflict did not erase the possibility of productive work between manufacturers and covered entities. The interesting part was less the optimism than its mechanics: transparency, a common workflow and a shared place to inspect contested information.
“I've become very familiar with the challenges that all stakeholders in the 340B program face.”Rhiannon Naslund, 2022
She also had a habit of widening the frame when credit was due. Announcing a redesigned manufacturer portal, Naslund congratulated the Brand and Marketing team, then named Product, Engineering and Design colleagues too. This is a small public gesture, but an informative one. In enterprise software, the promise is assembled across departments. Marketing may put the sentence in market; it does not get to invent the truth of it alone.
The translation loop
The room matters as much as the stage
Naslund's public footprint is more operator's notebook than personality broadcast. There are product launches, company milestones, team congratulations and reports from client gatherings. After an Origami Risk summit in London, she offered a three-part answer about her favorite moments: client reaction to the company's AI roadmap, clients teaching one another, and a tour of Lloyd's of London. The list moves from technology to peer exchange to the institution that has become shorthand for the insurance market itself.
That ordering reveals what a polished biography usually smooths away. Marketing is partly the craft of arranging rooms. Some are literal: summits, roundtables, demonstrations. Others are conceptual: the place where a customer problem meets a product roadmap, or where an engineering decision acquires language that sales can carry. Naslund's career crossed enough functions that she can plausibly recognize the dialect spoken in each.
A former colleague's public recommendation describes her as welcoming and able to collaborate across functions while leading work from concept to execution. Kalderos's chief executive, announcing her promotion, used two quieter words: creativity and steadiness. Neither description casts leadership as theater. Together they suggest a person trusted to keep momentum without making herself the center of it.
In early 2025, Naslund celebrated Origami Risk's workplace recognition and immediately pointed toward marketing roles that would soon open. Pride became a recruiting invitation. It is a recognizable executive reflex: turn good news into a door someone else can walk through.
Now the product is risk itself
Naslund arrived at Origami Risk in 2024, after a brief period as a fractional CMO peer advisor at Authentic. Her new company's canvas is broad. Its software serves corporate risk teams, insurers, administrators and public entities. It handles the unglamorous but consequential flow of incidents, claims, policies, exposures, audits and reports. These are tools people buy because scattered information has become expensive.
The communications challenge is correspondingly large. “Risk” can mean a workplace incident to one customer, a policy workflow to another, and a board-level pattern to a third. A single platform story has to hold those meanings together. Naslund's earlier experience in a multi-party software market is relevant here, as is the muscle memory from medical products: begin with the work, learn who depends on whom, and resist the temptation to make precision sound dull.
Origami Risk's current biography of Naslund describes a mix of data-driven strategy and creative vision. That pairing can sound like standard executive copy until it is placed beside her career. Data without narrative becomes a report nobody remembers. Narrative without operational grounding becomes decoration. Her jobs have repeatedly occupied the seam between the two.
The title changed. The habit did not: learn the system closely enough to explain why it matters.
A career made of useful proximity
There is an appealing modesty to Naslund's progression. No single leap claims to explain everything. The hospital supplied proximity to practice. Sales supplied proximity to resistance. Training supplied proximity to comprehension. Product leadership supplied proximity to engineering and design. The CMO role gathers all of those distances into one point of view.
It also offers a corrective to the idea that executive careers require early certainty. Naslund's bachelor's degree was in dietetics. Her first job was not a junior marketing post engineered to lead toward a corner office. Yet each move preserved something useful from the one before it. The career changed fields without discarding context.
The latest chapter places her alongside Origami Risk's product, technology, revenue and client leaders as the company talks about connected workflows and AI. Her contribution is to decide what those subjects mean for a person trying to get a claim moving, see a hazard sooner, reconcile a policy or give a leadership team a clearer picture of exposure.
Complicated markets always produce fog. They have too many participants, too much specialized language and too many consequences for the wrong simplification. Naslund has spent her working life in such places. Her advantage is neither mystery nor magic. She learned, role by role, to stand near enough to the product that the story could stay honest.