Fail Faster: Recent Episodes
Philosophie
We take you inside the trenches of enterprise and bring you the stories of the leaders who are creating the next generation of technology and products.
At Philosophie, we love making things. We are a diverse team of designers, engineers, and product strategists. With different backgrounds and skillsets, we come together to make exceptional technology. This podcast pairs members of our team with leaders from Fortune 500’s to startups in conversations that reveal surprising wins, juicy losses, and innovation techniques you’ll love.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we talk to Miloš Topić, VP for IT and Chief Digital Officer at Grand Valley State University. Miloš has 20+ years of experience in tech, innovation, and leadership. He specializes in digital strategy, security, and project management, holding degrees in computer science, information systems, an MBA, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration.
In this episode of Fail Faster podcast, we welcome Candis Curd, Director of Digital Transformation at Unum. Candis shares her inspiring journey from her vibrant childhood in Houston to her impactful role in digital transformation. She discusses the significant influence of her parents on her creative and technical interests, her early exposure to computer programming, and her passion for music. Candis delves into her professional growth, the importance of servant leadership, and her innovative work at Unum. Tune in to hear valuable insights from Candis on leveraging technology for social good, fostering team communication, and driving digital innovation.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we sit down with Laurel Jordan, Insurance TPA Officer and Solutions at Sutherland. Laurel shares her remarkable journey from a strict upbringing and a diverse professional background to becoming a leader in the insurance industry. She discusses the power of technology in insurance, the importance of employee experience, and her advocacy for women in leadership roles. Join us as Laurel reveals valuable lessons from her career, insights on digital transformation, and the future of insuretech.
In this episode of InfoBeans' Fail Faster podcast, we welcome Darren O'Connor, Global Product Manager at Logitech. Darren shares his journey from a sports-filled childhood in Ireland, to becoming a key player in product innovation at Logitech. He discusses the pivotal moments that shaped his career, the value of trying and failing, and the importance of being open to unexpected opportunities. Tune in to learn about Darren's experiences with industrial design, engineering, and leading successful product launches in the fast-paced tech industry.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Josh Angotti, VP of Network Automation and AI at Windstream. Josh shares his journey from growing up in central Pennsylvania to becoming a leader in AI and network operations. He discusses his team's work on predictive and prescriptive analytics, the integration of generative AI for operational efficiencies, and the future impact of AI in the tech industry. Tune in for insights into clear communication, strategic planning, and the transformative power of AI in network operations.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Heidi Bailey, Senior VP of Futures and AI at TPN. Heidi shares her journey from a multicultural childhood to a leader in AI, including launching Taylor Swift's first album. She explores the evolution, capabilities, and future potential of AI, highlighting the need for governance and energy solutions. Tune in for an insightful discussion on the transformative power of AI and what the future holds.
In this episode of InfoBeans' Fail Faster podcast, we welcome Ben Shephard, Executive Director at CIBC Innovation Banking. Ben shares his inspiring journey from a large family in Harlem to becoming a key figure in banking and the startup ecosystem. He talks about his early years, his path through the finance world, and how he found his passion for working with startups. Ben discusses the importance of integrity, flexibility, and the value of building genuine relationships. Tune in to hear valuable insights and learn from Ben's experiences in navigating the challenges and successes in banking and innovation.
In this episode of InfoBeans' Fail Faster podcast, we sit down with Barbara Widholm, Vice President in Global Technology at State Street Digital. Barbara shares her unique journey from her childhood in Vienna to her current role at State Street. She discusses her early influences, the importance of curiosity and critical thinking, and her passion for both psychology and technology. Barbara delves into the future of AI and VR, the importance of human-centric design, and the value of diverse skill sets in innovation. Tune in to gain valuable insights from Barbara's experiences and her vision for the future of technology.
In this episode of InfoBeans Fail Faster podcast, we welcome Romina Guevara, Chief Digital Officer at Michelin. Romina shares her inspiring story, from growing up in Mexico City and overcoming early hardships to becoming a leader in digital transformation. She discusses her diverse experiences in sales and digital products, the importance of data and AI, and the valuable lessons learned from both successes and failures. Tune in for insights on resilience, innovation, and making a meaningful impact.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Darwin Larrison, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Modern Woodmen of America. Darwin has been in the Information Security and Technology fields for over 20 years. He joined Modern Woodmen of America in December 2016.
Kishore Koduri is a seasoned IT professional with over 20+ years of leadership experience in the technology sector. He currently serves as the Senior Director of Enterprise Shared Services at Ameren, a Fortune 500 American power company serving Illinois and Missouri. Kishore has a rich background in leading complex IT departments and has been instrumental in driving digital transformation and modernization of critical applications.
In this episode of InfoBeans Fail Faster podcast, we welcome Hetal Patel, Managing Director of Business Architecture and Product Strategy at CIBC US. Hetal shares her journey from growing up in Bangalore to becoming a leader in the tech and financial sectors. She discusses the challenges and successes she faced, the importance of grit and continuous learning, and how her early experiences shaped her career. Tune in to hear about her transition from telecom to finance, her passion for product management, and her insights on building successful digital products.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Laurent Pierre, Senior Vice President of Global Customer Support at Nielsen IQ. Laurent shares his incredible journey from his childhood as the son of Haitian immigrants to leading global customer support at a major corporation. He discusses the pivotal moments that shaped his career, his experiences working with AI at IBM, and the challenges and triumphs of digital transformation. Join us as Laurent reveals insights on empathy, the role of AI in customer support, and the future of personalized customer experiences.
Heather Brizzi is from Cleveland, OH and has over 25 years of experience in Information Technology. She is an IT Director at White Cap, a Construction Supply Distributor, and leads the Functional Systems team as well as the Automation and AI CoE. Heather has been a leader who transforms technology-related strategy and operations across the enterprise. She builds and coaches strong, capable teams that provide excellent service and solutions with technology. Heather gave her first TEDx talk at Indiana University in 2022 called, “Building Resilience on the Playground” for their Playgrounds series and is a regular speaker, panelist, and moderator in the Technology and Women in Technology arenas.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Jaronika Dancy, Manager - HRIS Operations at Amsted Industries. She has worked in HR professional with a robust background in HRIS operations, strategic human resources management, and leadership. She excels in aligning HR technology with organizational goals to optimize processes and enhance employee experiences
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Patrick J Stefanski, Manager - IT Infrastructure & Support at Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation. Patrick has worked in the IT field for almost 30 years in the areas of transportation, healthcare, logistics, and marine construction, Patrick shares insights on overseeing both insourced and outsourced teams in the areas of traditional and cloud infrastructure, enterprise and offshore (marine) network connectivity, business system support, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance, endpoint management, field operations support and user support.
In this episode of Fail Faster podcast, we welcome Catherine Winfield - VP Experience Design at Autodesk. With 15+ years of experience in design and product, she has shaped, built, and launched products in healthcare, education, and consumer services at organizations like Foundation Medicine, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Hinge Health and others. With a values-aligned leadership style, she seeks to create psychologically safe environments that inspire teams to take big bets and thrive in meaningful careers.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Phil Komarny, Chief Information Officer at Maryville University of Saint Louis. Phil shares his unique journey from growing up as an Army brat to becoming a leading innovator in education technology. He discusses his early ventures in the internet industry, his transition into higher education, and his passion for leveraging technology to transform learning. Join us as Phil reveals his insights on AI, personalized education, and the importance of putting people first in digital transformation.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Mark Armour, Senior Director, IT, Governance, Risk & Compliance at Brink's Inc, Mark is a Resilience industry leader with over 20 years of experience in the field. Mark has been instrumental in the implementation and leadership of several global business continuity and crisis management programs. More importantly, Mark has been directly involved in corporate response and recovery for hundreds of events, from IT outages and natural disasters to pandemics. Mark is the author, along with David Lindstedt, PhD, of the Adaptive Business Continuity Manifesto and the book, Adaptive Business Continuity: A New Approach. He has written articles for the Journal of Business Continuity and Emergency Planning, the only peer reviewed publication in the profession. He has spoken on podcasts and at conferences, including Continuity Insights, Disaster Recovery Journal, the World Conference on Disaster Management and the ACP Leadership Council. He is currently the Sr. Director of Global Resilience at Brink’s, Incorporated, the worldwide leader in secure logistics and cash management solutions.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Paul Lewis, Chief Technology Officer at Pythian. As CTO, Paul Lewis drives Pythian’s technology strategy, helping customers leverage and scale their data and cloud assets to deliver valuable business outcomes throughout their digital transformation journey. In addition, Paul steers technical innovations that continue to expand partner relationships. As a 30+ year global CTO and technology executive, Paul is well-known in the industry for his impassioned technology evangelism, client executive advocacy, and technological and business strategy, particularly as it relates to digital transformation and operational IT strategy.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Nate Melby, Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Dairyland since February 29, 2016, leads the company's IT strategy and systems development. He holds a BS in Information Systems from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, an MBA with a Technology and Training focus from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and a Ph.D. in Information Systems from Nova Southeastern University, specializing in Information Security and Telecommunications. He has furthered his education with a Certificate of Management Excellence from Harvard Business School and completed the Business Engagement for the Security Professional (BESP) program at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. In 2024, he received the Wisconsin CIO of the Year ORBIE award in the Large Corporate category. Active in his community, Nate is Fire Chief of the Town of Campbell Fire Department, serves on the Board of Directors of the Wisconsin State Fire Chiefs Association, and has received the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s Rada Distinguished Alumni Award.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Michael Warren, Associate Vice President of Digital Practice Innovation at AECOM. Michael shares his unique journey from a childhood filled with curiosity and a passion for learning to a career that bridges architecture and technology. He discusses his transition into the tech industry, and how he integrates AI and machine learning into his projects. Join us as Michael provides insights into the future of architecture, the role of technology, and the importance of continuous learning and innovation.
In this episode of InfoBeans Fail Faster podcast, we welcome Sravan Kasarla, the former Chief Data Officer of Thrivent Financial. Sravan shares his 25-year journey in data and analytics, discussing how AI has grown from a niche topic to a powerful tool in business today. He explains the challenges of working with data in large organizations and introduces his framework for successfully executing data and AI projects. Sravan highlights the importance of asking the right questions to get meaningful results from AI and looks ahead at how AI might shape the future, especially in making processes smoother and more efficient. This episode is a great listen for anyone curious about how data and AI can drive real business success.
In this episode of InfoBeans "Fail Faster" podcast, we welcome back Juan Carlos, VP of Product at Intercare Therapy, for an insightful discussion on rethinking how we think. Juan shares his project, Remind Thinking Cards—a deck designed to help people make better decisions by leveraging mental models and frameworks. He dives into the inspiration behind the cards, how they can be used to enhance productivity and leadership, and his vision for empowering others to think more clearly in a world filled with constant information. Whether you're looking to boost your decision-making skills or just curious about innovative tools for personal growth, this episode offers valuable takeaways that can be applied in both professional and personal life.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Ted Scott, founder of the innovation function at Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS). Ted has positioned HHS as a leader in AI in healthcare. He was formerly Chief Innovation Officer at Mohawk College, where he launched IDEAWORKS. With a background in digital health strategy, Ted started as a sonographer at HHS and holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in Diagnostic Imaging. Join us to explore Ted’s journey and insights on AI in healthcare.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we sit down with Rajiv Avacharmal, a seasoned leader in AI and Model Risk Management with over 13 years of experience in the financial services and insurance industries. Currently serving as a Corporate Vice President at New York Life Insurance Company, Rajiv shares his insights on leading successful AI and Risk Management initiatives. Previously, he managed comprehensive AI model risk frameworks at MUFG Union Bank. Join us as we explore Rajiv’s journey, his passion for fostering innovation, and his thoughts on the future of AI in risk management. Rajiv also gives us a glimpse into his personal life, where he enjoys traveling and reading in his free time.
In this episode of InfoBeans' Fail Faster podcast, we sit down with Adi Sivaraman, Principal at Architect Capital, to discuss his fascinating journey from India to becoming a key player in the investment world. Adi shares his early interests in math and policy debate, his career beginnings on Wall Street, and his passion for investing. Dive deep into the nuances of tech-enabled insurance, learn about the most innovative insurance products on the market, and gain valuable insights into how Adi evaluates investment opportunities. This episode is packed with practical advice and thought-provoking discussions on the future of insurance technology and investment strategies.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Tim Seward, a trailblazer in industrial design. With a decade of experience working with top firms like Y-Studios and Lunar, Tim has shaped iconic brands such as SONOS, ONYX, and Bird. Join us as we explore Tim’s journey from overcoming personal challenges to creating groundbreaking products. He shares insights on blending creativity with engineering, leading with empathy, and the importance of continuous learning in design.
In this episode, we welcome Samir Jhaveri, VP of Operations Strategy and Transformation at MUFG. Samir is dedicated to transforming the Operations organization, leveraging his leadership and strategic expertise. He leads initiatives in organizational design, governance, reporting, and location strategy.
With a background in management consulting at EY and Accenture, Samir has a proven track record of improving efficiency and reducing costs through streamlined processes and technology solutions. Beyond his professional achievements, Samir enjoys staying active, watching Bollywood movies, and spending time with his family and dog in Long Island. Join us to hear Samir’s insights and experiences in transforming operations at MUFG.
In this episode of Fail Faster, we welcome Chris Pearson, Director of Salesforce Development at Jostens. With 18 years of experience, Chris shares insights on Salesforce development, product management, and tech-driven business strategy. A must-listen for tech enthusiasts and business strategists!
In this episode of Fail Faster, we are excited to have Derek Nohr as our special guest. Derek is the Director of People Technology and the ServiceNow platform owner at Avalara. His journey is fueled by a profound passion for process improvement and an optimism that inspires those around him. With a 'never settle' philosophy, Derek envisions a better world, and he believes that ServiceNow holds the key to turning this utopian dream into reality. He is adept at using all the ServiceNow Legos to break down functional silos and demonstrate how collaborative teamwork and efficient workflow management can transform business operations into an enjoyable experience.
Welcome to Fail Faster! In this episode, we are excited to have Brad Power, Senior Director Digital Product & User Experience at Kendra Scott. Brad is an experienced leader responsible for defining global vision and strategy, in support of business and technology goals. He's built high-performing, cross-disciplined teams responsible for supply chain, in store and online experiences, product management, analytics, e-commerce, social and customer care. He is an Internal evangelist for emerging trends, best practices and global digital brand standards. Brad has been responsible for PnL budget, managing agency relationships, negotiating partnerships and guiding product development including infrastructure and platform implementation.
Welcome to Fail Faster! Today, we are thrilled to introduce our guest, Syed Bilal Ali, affectionately known as Syed Ali. With a rich background spanning over two decades in the Information Technology field, Syed brings a wealth of experience and insights to our discussion. Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Syed's journey in technology leadership began early, fueled by his passion for innovation and community impact. He has spent significant time in management roles, collaborating with exceptional teams throughout his career. Currently, Syed is a pivotal part of Legacy Community Health, the largest non-profit organization in Texas and the 7th largest nationwide. Join us as we explore Syed's insights on technology leadership, community impact, and the transformative power of technology in enriching lives and organizations. Stay tuned for an engaging and enlightening conversation ahead!
Welcome to Fail Faster! In today's episode, we are excited to have Stephen Sturdevant as our special guest. With over two decades of experience in the technology sector, Stephen's journey began on an IT help desk and progressed through various roles in IT process management, ServiceNow development, architecture, and leadership. His extensive experience spans across diverse industries such as financial services, building products, packaging, video gaming, consulting, and cybersecurity. A graduate of BYU with a degree in business management, Stephen brings a unique blend of technical expertise and business acumen to the table. Beyond his professional achievements, Stephen shares a fulfilling personal life with his wife of over 20 years and their three children.
Leepa Mohanty serves as the Director of Program Strategy at the Business Transformation Office of Reynolds Consumer Products. Her overarching goal is to steer the organization towards success, leveraging her expertise in leadership, strategy, and program management. Leading a high-performing team, Leepa spearheads crucial transformation initiatives, enhancing revenue streams and optimizing business operations. Driven by a fervor for cultivating inclusive workplaces, Leepa is committed to nurturing environments where everyone feels valued. Prior to her role at Reynolds Consumer Products, she played instrumental roles in transformation within the Fintech sector at Citibank and Capgemini. Leepa has a proven track record of tackling intricate challenges and delivering tangible results. Beyond her professional pursuits, Leepa finds joy in creating music. She resides in Chicago with her husband and two children.
Jennifer Rött (pronounced “wrote”) is a strategic Product, User Experience, and Design leader specializing in human-centered products and platforms. Jennifer has 20 years of experience sustainably scaling and growing people, teams, products, cloud, SaaS, and enterprise platforms through empathy and collaboration. Jennifer has pioneered innovations across social, entertainment, and media technology - winning over two dozen awards in the last 2 years for Innovation and Design, including a Red Dot. Jennifer believes diversity of thought and experience make for the most innovative and inclusive products. Jennifer leads Innovation through data, research, and exploration that puts people first.
In this episode, our guest is Kinshuk Mishra, a seasoned leader in the tech and healthcare space, who is currently Chief Technology Officer for healthcare financial engagement platform, Cedar. Kinshuk takes us through his career journey, reflecting on pivotal moments, including both successes and failures. From the importance of trusting your instincts to the complexities of behavioral change within organizations, Kinshuk shares valuable insights for technology leaders and aspiring engineering professionals to assess against.
Naveen Chadalavada brings his operational mindset and experience leading teams to business problems at hand. While he is currently leading a team at Phreesia who grows and nurtures partnerships, he has had a variety of experience both in and out of the classroom across the provider healthcare space. From his days in consulting to his time in the technology space, Naveen has focused much of his professional career on building a foundational toolkit to help him set up to be a leader in the healthcare industry. Naveen enjoys meeting new people, learning about their passions, and fostering collaborative networks. During his free time, you will likely catch him at a sporting event or spending time with his family. Naveen has a master’s degree in business from the Kellogg School of Management and a master’s degree in public health from George Washington University. These experiences provide an academic complement to his professional experiences in the field.
Shazil is a seasoned product leader with over 14 years of experience in multiple industries across 14 countries. As a product professional Shazil has worked to launch 0-1 and 0-n products and has created, coached and led teams to offer immense outputs during his career. Currently Shazil lives in Toronto Canada with his wife and works for Scotiabank as a director of product management for the payments team. In his free time Shazil likes to explore hiking trails and Toronto in general and also is an avid Fifa player on the playstation and a passionate Chelsea football club supporter.
Join us on the "Fail Faster" podcast as we dive into the fascinating world of product management and innovation with our special guest, Jaxon Merrill, VP, of Digital Product & Digital Product Design at Beautycounter. With a unique background in both audio and product management, Jaxon shares insights from his transformative projects, including a deep dive into the Beachbody streaming service. Discover how he navigated the challenges of shifting from physical DVD sales to a subscription-based model, using agile methodologies and user-centric approaches. In this episode, Jaxon sheds light on the intersection of AI and product management, emphasizing the importance of curiosity in the ever-evolving tech landscape. From building teams and conducting user research to embracing the psychology of fitness, his experiences provide valuable lessons for aspiring product managers.
Join us on the Fail Faster podcast as Kristy Tupper, Vice President of Product Management at RxSense, shares her inspiring journey in and around the healthcare IT industry. From navigating various facets of the business to her impactful role in prescription benefits, Christy discusses leadership principles, overcoming setbacks, and the importance of maintaining a user-centered focus. Tune in for insights into industry trends, the power of networking, and the wisdom gained from turning failures into opportunities.
Chad Niemuth is the Global Vice President of Marketing and Sales Technology within the IT organization at the Campari Group. For the past 24 years of his career he has led single and multi-brand organizations in developing technology solutions and platforms, grounded in process, data, integration, and tangible KPIs and reporting. This stems from an unrelenting passion for technology, but grounded in the impact it has in connecting people. Building upon a foundation developed in university through a degree in Advertising and Sociology, He continues to search for the perfect execution, which drives the most organization value internally and externally impacting employees, customers, and consumers – people and groups. In his most recent 11 years he has spent leading the sixth largest CPG and the sixth largest spirits companies globally in developing platforms of capability for over 80 household name brands. Touted as the PnL equalizer across the brands he serves – whereby leveraging large investments to create innovation and experience for consumers and then re-engineering the same capability across a portfolio of brands, his solutions have contributed to driving a double value share growth for the Manpower Group and the Campari Group.
Elio Damaggio is a product leader with over 15 years of experience in cloud computing, IoT, and AI. Currently serving as the Head of Product for AWS in the Next Generation Developer Experience organization, he is building new ways to empower software developer teams with AI. Elio began his tech journey as a product manager at Microsoft, where he worked on Azure Mobile, IoT, and big data services. At Microsoft, he amassed an impressive portfolio of 11 patents, all related to cloud technologies and IoT. Elio's passions extend to gaming, where he enjoys RPGs, strategy games, and adventures. He's also an amateur musician, wasting time writing songs with his acoustic and electric guitars.
Peter Papaioannou, the inaugural Vice President of Product at Everyware, is a seasoned professional in the fintech and payments sector. With a wealth of experience collaborating with renowned global organizations, Peter has excelled in high-growth environments, showcasing his proficiency in strategic visioning and pioneering product innovation. In his previous role as the Vice President of Global Product at Global Payments, Papaioannou played a pivotal role in shaping the strategic vision and fostering innovation. His focus was on delivering cutting-edge omnichannel, e-commerce, and in-store solutions to a vast network of over four million merchants.
Kevin Washington is the Director of Product Management for Experimentation & Customer Feedback Experiences at Best Buy and has a broad background of experience at omnichannel retailers. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Morehouse College where he teaches Product Management to Business and CS students. Kevin’s passions are deeply rooted in creating equitable opportunities for students and that has led him to sit on the board of two annual hackathons that target historically Black colleges & universities and Hispanic serving institutions respectively.
Mandy Janicki has spent her career fully in-house for the past 18 years for companies based in Michigan, California and Chicago. In her current role, Mandy founded the Creative Studio in 2015 to serve as UL Solutions' first in-house agency—an innovative solution that greatly reduced UL Solutions' dependence on external agencies and strengthened the quality of marketing collateral and brand messaging. Mandy leads a global team of writers, designers and UX experts spearheading digital content creation, brand identity development, and user experiences for global corporations. She has proven success executing an average of 1,700 projects annually, realizing cost savings of up to $4M.
Preetha Sekharan, VP, Digital Incubator, Applied AI & Transformation joins us as we delve into the challenges and successes of establishing a digital strategy practice in a well-established company, along with insights on AI implementation in the insurance industry. In this episode you will learn how strategies are tailored, technology readiness is assessed, and what kind of leadership mindset goes into successful digital transformations. We also dipped into the gap between strategy and execution, and the importance of actionable strategies and effective communication. Preetha shares how AI is operationalized, the value of involving operational experts, and the journey from skepticism to trust. Tune in for practical insights on technology adoption and adaptation in the corporate world. This episode has some great lessons from the corporate trenches.
Nicolas Hien serves as Chief Information Officer at Dollarama where he has the supervisory responsibility over the IT function and the Project Management Office.
Meet Stan Rapp, a name in the design world who transitioned from being a self-taught designer to leading Enterprise Design at Asana. Before his current role, Stan shaped product design at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. On top of his design expertise, he's a certified coach and a recent graduate of UPenn's Executive Design Leadership program. Specializing in design strategy and co-creation, he's particularly interested in designing for emotions and behavior change. A native of Ukraine, now residing in the SF Bay Area, Stan has shared his insights at several notable conferences, including The Next Web and Adobe. He has also won awards from SF Design Week and TechCrunch Disrupt.
Bryan Lane is a writer, speaker, and technology advisor focused on using data and AI for the public good. He is currently serving as the chief of business intelligence at the FDIC. Prior to that, he co-founded the government-wide AI Center of Excellence at GSA, where he supported organizations like the DoD Joint AI Center. While in government service, he has developed nearly $1B in AI and data-related contracts and deployed enterprise-wide capabilities to hybrid cloud platforms. Prior to joining the federal government, Bryan led product management for a software firm that was strategically acquired for $250M and was an analytic consultant for IBM. He also served as an active duty Marine and Arabic linguist, with deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror. He routinely writes on AI, data, and society and has been featured in widely distributed Medium publications such as HumanParts, OneZero, The Generator, and DATA XD.
Ashley Nelson, VP Innovation - Mastercard Foundry, joins us as we delve into the professional journey of an innovation and new product development expert. From experiences at Citi and MasterCard to driving innovation in various global landscapes, the discussion unfolds the challenges and triumphs faced in a regulated industry. The conversation covers topics such as successful product stories, meeting market demands, gaining stakeholder trust, decision points for product decommissioning, and exciting developments in emerging technologies like AI and blockchain. Ashley also shares insights on handling diverse projects, the importance of continuous learning of the evolving market demands and delivering a service that is aligned with customer requirements within tight timelines.
Join us on the Fail Faster podcast as we delve into the world of high-impact, high-visibility e-commerce strategies with Hailong Shen, Director of eCommerce Technology at Royal Caribbean. He shares insights from his extensive career in the travel industry, touching on his experiences at American Airlines and Royal Caribbean Group. Discover how Heilong's fail-fast mentality and focus on customer-centric innovation have contributed to the success of these industry giants. From streamlining payment processes to navigating challenges during COVID-19, we explore the dynamic world of e-commerce and its pivotal role in shaping exceptional travel experiences. Tune in for valuable tips on personalization, user experience, and the future of e-commerce in the cruise industry. Don't miss this engaging conversation with a leader who's truly steering the ship towards a brighter future in e-commerce and travel.
Join us on the "Fail Faster" podcast as we sit down with Jag Bedi, Vice President - Data Science and Analytics at Purchasing Power. In this insightful episode, we delve into the fascinating world of e-tail and how Purchasing Power empowers customers to improve their quality of life through affordable access to products and services. Jag shares the challenges and successes of implementing a data warehouse and the impact it has had on decision-making and customer engagement. Discover how data-driven strategies are shaping the future of this innovative company and get valuable insights into driving change within your organization. Don't miss this inspiring conversation on leveraging data for growth!
Join us for a special episode of the Fail Faster podcast as we explore the world of customer support with Matthew Caron, VP of Customer Experience and Onboarding at OpenTable. Matthew shares his personal journey from holding a CSR job nobody desires to uncovering beauty within the chaos and becoming a successful leader in customer support. He candidly discusses the challenges he faced and how he not only overcame but also eliminated the victim mindset that he repeatedly came across in this industry.
Matthew also offers a valuable perspective and tactical advice on how to empower the CSR teams as they hold the precious human connection every brand desires to establish and nurture long term. He strongly believes that the CSR team holds the success of any brand in that sense. This episode is a must listen for every leader who influences the customer support function of their org, as you will find some game changing techniques.
Welcome to the "Fail Faster" podcast, where we dive deep into the world of cybersecurity with a well known industry expert Mark Ashworth, Chief Information Security Officer at First Bank. In this episode, Mark shares his journey from a fascination with technology sparked by a movie to becoming the CISO at First Bank. We get into the weeds of a secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) and the challenges of integrating security seamlessly. Mark also delves into the ever-evolving threat landscape and the critical role of a strong security culture within organizations. Join us as we uncover valuable insights and stories from the frontlines of cybersecurity, helping you navigate this complex and vital field.
Oleg Slyusarchuk serves as the global head of Product Design at Eleks. As part of his role, Oleg has been managing a design team consisting of 60 designers in various countries, including the UK, US, Germany, Canada, Estonia, Croatia, Poland, and Portugal, for the past 7 years.
With 20 years of experience in the field of design and a certification in Design Management from Nielsen Norman Group, Oleg is particularly passionate about business and service design. He excels in crafting customized solutions within the Healthcare, Finance, and Insurance sectors, drawing inspiration from various design methodologies.
Join us in this episode as we chat with Daniel Meretsky, a tech and restaurant industry expert. With over 15 years of experience, Daniel shares his insights into pioneering smart card technology, optimizing McDonald's operations, and adapting to changing customer preferences. Discover how data and AI are shaping the restaurant industry and the importance of leadership in fostering a collaborative team. Explore Daniel's involvement with innovative brands like Fresh Kitchen, Callie, and Camp, all dedicated to health, nutrition, and excellence. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, restaurant pro, or aspiring leader, this episode offers valuable insights at the intersection of technology, innovation, and leadership in the restaurant world.
Ryan Spanswick is a relentless servant leader that has spent the last 18 years leading and designing in enterprise organizations like SiriusXM, Starbucks, and IBM. He truly believes that investing in the health and success of people creates the highest quality work and builds design organizations that thrive and endure. He enjoys the challenge of creating impactful and intuitive user experiences that drive significant value for the business.
In this episode, we sit down with Soumam Debgupta, SVP of Product, JLL Technologies. He is a seasoned product leader who shares his remarkable journey from humble beginnings in India to becoming a product management guru. Discover how he navigated the ever-changing real estate industry, learned from both successes and failures and leveraged his craft-based approach to continuously refine his skills. Get inspired to embrace the unconventional and chart your own path in the world of product management. Let's tune in for insights, anecdotes, and valuable career advice from Soumam's extraordinary career.
Join us as we chat with Andrew Moore, VP of Software Engineering at Nations Lending. In this engaging conversation, we explore Andrew's diverse background in the tech industry, from networking and IT support to data engineering and software development. He shares how he overcame misconceptions about software engineering and found joy in solving problems and helping people. Andrew shares the importance of understanding the root causes of problems before crafting technical solutions. He also emphasizes the need for pragmatic technology applications, especially in today's rapidly evolving tech landscape.
Meet Sabrina Wong, the Head of UX at Tapestry and a dedicated university instructor. With a wide-ranging expertise that encompasses product design, research, and digital strategy, Sabrina has collaborated with a diverse array of organizations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, to elevate their products and services to new heights. Beyond her professional pursuits, Sabrina also imparts her knowledge as a UX/UI design instructor at the prestigious University of Miami and several other esteemed universities.
In this episode, we sit down with Chris Neuharth, the Vice President of Experience and Digital Innovation at Children's Wisconsin, to explore the journey from his background in software development to his current role at the forefront of healthcare technology. We discuss the evolution of user experience, the power of co-designing solutions with families and care teams, and the role of empathy in shaping impactful healthcare solutions. Join us as we uncover how technology is not only mitigating anxiety but also redefining the way families navigate and manage their children's healthcare needs. Discover the latest trends, successes, and challenges in the realm of digital health as we journey towards more accessible, empathetic, and integrated care.
This is a super interesting episode with Stacey Maresco, Chief Product Officer at Empowered Education, where we get a glimpse into her remarkable career journey, including her role as an early employee at a startup that achieved explosive growth and her experience with integrating companies after acquisition. Stacey shares how in her role she is helping individuals become health and wellness coaches and functional nutrition counselors. She highlights the power of rapid testing in product development, and the invaluable lessons learned from taking risks in her career. Join us on this inspiring journey of personal and professional growth with Stacey.
Join us in this insightful and inspiring podcast as we dive into the world of product and software design with Jonathan Madera, the VP of Product Design for Data Accent. Jonathan shares his journey from childhood dreams of being a computer animator to becoming a successful designer and entrepreneur. As we delve into the world of data design, Jonathan reveals the challenges of simplifying data access for small business owners and the role of AI in making the user experience delightful. Get motivated and gain valuable insights in this podcast for aspiring designers and creatives!
Gretchen Nash is a Creative Director at Amazon who leads a team of visual, UX, and motion designers to innovate next in class experiences for Alexa enabled products. She has over 15 years of professional creative experience spanning across graphic design, motion graphics, and leading teams to build multi-sensory experiences for technical innovation. Gretchen began her career as a graphic designer who learned interaction design on the job, eventually growing into a leadership role as a UX Creative Director. One of Gretchen’s greatest passions is leading teams and building inclusive creative environments that provoke thought sharing and collaboration.
Join us on the Fail Faster podcast for an episode with Jonas Klink, VP of Product and UX Design at Thrive Market. Discover how Thrive Market innovates online grocery shopping to make healthy living accessible, affordable, and easy. Jonas shares his passion for curating a sustainable experience that adds value to the everyday lives of Thrive Market’s 1.2M members. He shares the progressive thinking behind the concept of redefining the online shopping experience, the continuous learnings, and the solutions that spring from the intent of creating personalized customer connections. This is a unique episode with valuable advice for e-commerce and subscription enthusiasts from Jonas.
Alan is the Senior Director of UX at EAB. His team curates the next generation college search experience for students as well as 2,500 universities. In the last 10 years, Alan improved the digital experiences for Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg, and ESPN; created new interactions in VR for people to shop, travel, and tour high-end real estates from afar. He is passionate in visual storytelling to make design vision tangible and communication memorable. Outside of work, Alan is a top mentor on ADPList, an avid snowboarder, and a food enthusiast living in NYC.
Joie Chung is a seasoned product design leader based in Austin, TX. With over 17 years in the design industry, she has gained a deep understanding of what makes great user experiences, and how strategic design can drive business growth. Passionate about cultivating the next generation of design talent, Joie is deeply committed to creating environments that foster growth, mentoring future leaders, and enabling her teams to deliver their best work. She has led top-performing teams in both agency and in-house settings, working with a broad spectrum of companies across various industries. Joie approaches design and leadership with empathy, creativity, and a growth mindset. She thrives on collaboration, always seeking to create impactful change and push the boundaries of what’s possible. Currently, she is a Senior Director of Product Design at Realtor.com, leading a team building professional tools to facilitate better home buying and selling journeys for everyone.
Jarrett Carter, Associate Vice President, Integrative Learning Design at University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) joins us to share his journey into leading and designing integrative learning experiences. He shares the importance of working together as one team towards a shared goal of creating seamless educational platforms catering to a diverse global population at various stages of their careers and personal learning journeys. Jarrett dives into the approach his team takes as they strive to stay relevant among students spanning various generations. He shares the challenges to solve for when bringing in innovative solutions and his excitement of seeing more Gen AI applications in the upcoming learning experiences at UMGC.
Luis Bustamante, Associate UX Design Director has over 10 years of design experience. He is currently working at AKQA New York in multiple projects since July, 2022. Luis has worked for tech companies like GLOBANT, start ups & agencies like HUGE with clients like Google, Coldwell banker (US), Zaplabs and Provida AFP (Chile). He really enjoys working on UX writing and A11y and is currently exploring AI technologies.
Guy Assedou is the former Chief Product Officer, at BQE Software and Ex-Meta leader. Guy joins us today to bring to surface the role of a good product manager who can keep his team focused with the right mindset and can add a lot of value to the organization. Guy shares the reasons why projects fail and what approaches can minimize failures from the get-go. Guy also shares great tips for successful product roll-outs with tactical examples of how to target healthy adoption. He emphasizes the importance of a strong partnership between the product and design teams, where clear problems and roles are defined towards successful outcomes.
Samip Mehra, Senior Vice President Of Engineering at Synapse, joins us today for a peek at his world. Synapse is a launchpad for Financial Innovation. They are the only regulated embedded finance platform provider that enables companies across the globe to launch feature complete deposit, payment, and credit products at scale. Samip believes that one of the ways of staying relevant is by sharing your knowledge like an open book. He truly believes that leaders are as good as their teams. Investing in your team's happiness is crucial, creating an environment where they commit towards a collective outcome is a great recipe for impactful results. Samip enjoys creating relationships that last. He extended a warm invite to the host to visit his beautiful town and his home in Phoenix, Arizona.
Paul Ghio, VP Product, Shutterstock Marketplace product leader joins us for a super insightful episode of Fail Faster. Paul shares a very interesting story of a risky bet a company made that touches on the common root problem of why products fail. He shares how sometimes products are built on approximations for personas who don't exist and what could be the expense for such decisions, how businesses might be missing crucial learnings by keeping their focus only on the profits and the responsibility of good designers who check their biases at the door and carry their customers on their shoulders in the conference room.
In this episode of the "Fail Faster Podcast," our guest, Kapil Dhawan, Vice President, Engineering at SymphonyAI Retail CPG, shares his insights and experiences as a leader in the retail and CPG industry, focusing on Symphony AI's endeavors in customer-centric retailing and data-driven decision-making. The discussion covers the integration of AI and generative AI models, customer demands for real-time insights, and the challenges of balancing competing priorities. Kapil also offers valuable tips on staying calm in tricky situations and the importance of perseverance in achieving long-term goals. Join us to gain valuable insights into the world of AI in retail and CPG.
In this episode, we dive into the fascinating journey of Arul Isai Imran, Vice President of Product and UX Design at Premise Data. Premise Data is a technology company that collects, analyzes, and provides real-time global data to empower businesses and organizations with valuable insights. Arul shares insightful stories from his career, including how he learned to fail faster and pivot when needed. From building innovative mobile apps to managing a diverse team, Arul's experiences offer valuable lessons in the ever-changing world of product design. Join us as we explore the importance of embracing failure, developing a learning mindset, and creating a safe and supportive environment for team successes.
Join us for an insightful episode featuring Saifu Muhammad, VP of User Experience and Product at Xometry, as he shares his diverse journey from web development to product management. Discover how Xometry, a leading on-demand manufacturing platform, bridges the gap between product management and design, fostering a collaborative approach. Learn about Saifu's tools and techniques for cultivating critical thinking and driving impactful outcomes. Saifu also shares his experiences with setbacks and successes, and his passion for holistic product development at Xometry. Don't miss this exciting conversation!
Amanda Culver is a Senior Product Designer with 6 years of experience at Frost Bank where she crafts experiences that help Texans improve their financial health and literacy. She’s passionate about giving as much love and attention to her personal life as she does to her work—always keeping the two separate—and mentors young designers on how to stand out in the interview process, how to navigate and build healthy work relationships, and find fulfillment in the day-to-day work.
Prashant Kumar, VP of Products at Bluecore, a retail marketing platform that enables marketers to connect casual shoppers to the products that transform them into lifetime customers, joins us for a highly insightful conversation. He shares how one visit to witness the day in the life of a brand front liner was an awakening that shaped the future of his career. Prashant shares insights about what marketers need for customer retention. He also talks about how data, empathy, intelligence and being flexible can feed the demands of an evolving customer. Identification of the customer demands remains the key to successful outcomes for both the brand and the consumer.
Join us as we demystify Web 3 and blockchain technologies with Sumeet Ahuja, Vice President - Product at Circle. Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of digital currencies. Let's discover how these innovations impact businesses, customers, and society and learn about the early adopters, the governance failures and what to expect next. Sumeet is passionate about contributing by giving back, he does that as a mentor by empowering leaders of tomorrow and as an investor advisor to startups. Get a glimpse of the future possibilities of Web 3 and blockchain from Sumeet's perspective.
Join Jeremy Katzeff, Head of Buy Side Solutions at Golden Source, as he shares successes and failures in financial services UX. Golden Source is a leading provider of data management solutions, empowering businesses with accurate and reliable data for enhanced decision-making. Discover how institutions are adapting to data explosion and creating user-centric designs for better decision-making. Get insights on driving transformation in the industry and the future of finance. Tune in for an engaging discussion on the Fail Faster podcast!
In this episode of Fail Faster, we sit down with Daniela Shuffler, VP, Head of Product Design at The Knot Worldwide. Daniela shares her interesting and winding path of navigating the industry as a self-taught designer to leveraging human connection and emotion to drive great user experiences, at a leading global wedding experience provider. She talks about how this flagship brand has stayed relevant for decades. What has driven opportunities for establishing radical relatability with their customers and vendors as they look to the future of their brand and their business.
InfoBeans' Fail Faster team welcomes Luis Mata, CTO of Metabolic Living Technology. He shares the secrets of empowering individuals in their health and wellness journey. He highlights his unique approach to recruiting and the keys to building happy, high-performing teams. There are a lot of invaluable lessons and strategies Luis shares in this episode for leaders to thrive in the ever-evolving tech landscape.
Todd Unger is the Chief Experience Officer of the American Medical Association, where he has driven record growth and gained international recognition for their CX program. A transformational marketing and digital executive, Unger’s experience places him at the nexus of e-commerce, content, technology, product development and marketing, the building blocks of today’s customer experience. Unger spent a decade at marketing powerhouses Procter & Gamble and Leo Burnett (where he helped invent GladWare Containers) before he leapt into the exploding digital world as a product manager in the early days of America Online, leading the $100 million AOL Local business and pioneering a predecessor to today’s Yelp. As a Chief Digital Officer and CMO, he’s since led digital and marketing teams across large and small media companies, including Lifetime Television, Time Inc. and the DailyRacing Form.
Jeremy Abrams is a self-taught UX practitioner. His unique blend of formal education and self-led learning led him through the rough-and-tumble world of startups to his current role as UX Director at Prosper Marketplace. Jeremy values leading with empathy, learning through failure, and fostering shared trust to empower his team. Prior to Prosper, Jeremy spearheaded the design of remote healthcare products at Anthem Insurance (now known as Elevance Health). As a staunch advocate of independent learning, Jeremy mentors aspiring UX professionals in his free time.
Elizabeth Benker is a user experience and product design leader. She builds design teams that launch human-centered products. In her 20+ years in the tech industry, she’s helped over 50 companies design flagship products that work better for people. Currently, she is head of user experience and global content at Alteryx, the leading analytics cloud platform.
Dave Clark believes that the right design approach can create amazing experiences, solve practically any problem, and create massive business value. He is the VP of Experience Design at Kin + Carta, a global digital transformation consultancy, and oversees digital product design across a wide range of F1000 clients in Aviation, Healthcare, FinTech, Agtech and Aerospace. Prior to joining Kin + Carta, Dave spent two decades designing digital experiences and leading design and innovation teams at agencies in Chicago, San Francisco, and Southern California. When he isn't thinking about design, Dave is spending as much time as he can with his wife and their three wonderful children.
Michael Hough is a highly skilled designer with over 23 years of experience. He has held various roles, including Flash animator, HTML email designer, web designer, front-end developer, visual designer, and now specializes as a UI/UX designer.
During his 13-year tenure as a freelancer and contractor, Michael became adept at user research, wireframing, basic UX principles, and prototyping. He unknowingly performed UX work before the term gained popularity. Recognizing the value of his skills, he embraced the role of a UX designer, propelling his career forward.
Today, Michael's holistic approach to design combines aesthetics and functionality, ensuring seamless user experiences. With a track record of successful projects, he continues to evolve and stay ahead of industry trends. Michael Hough's extensive expertise, dedication to self-improvement, and ability to adapt make him a highly sought-after UI/UX designer, shaping the design landscape with his remarkable talent.
Yannis Paniaras is an accomplished Principal Level Director and Designer with extensive experience in leading multidisciplinary product development and design management teams across the United States, Europe, and China. Currently, Yannis is a founding member of Microsoft Digital's AI Center of Excellence, where he spearheads AI investments and experiences for various employee experiences within Microsoft. He has also transformed the creative direction for Microsoft Employee Experiences (EE) through close collaboration with the UX Strategy team in the Employee Experience Studio, setting a new standard for user-centric design and innovation. Yannis holds a Master of Arts degree from Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, and has received comprehensive education in Italy, the United States, Finland, Sweden, and China.
As Head of Product Design & Research at Oracle, Jod Kaftan leads a design practice that strives to meaningfully impact climate change and provide SaaS solutions that bring critical energy services to populations globally. Jod has more than 20 years of extensive end-to-end expertise in the enterprise and at both agencies and start-ups, driving cross-channel experiences across platforms for blue-chip clients such as Sony, Microsoft, Riot Games, Google and Wells Fargo. Before leading design teams at Oracle and Accenture Song, Jod was an experience designer and strategist at shops such as Razorfish and Possible, where he’s been exposed to a large spectrum of business models and design problems, from CPG, Financial Services and Entertainment to Non-Profits, start-ups and innovation labs. When not at home in Los Angeles, Jod is probably hiking with his wife, 12-year-old son and dog in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Jeremy Smith is an analytical creator who believes that there is an underlying structure to every experience and outcome we have. His efforts to decode solutions have led him down many paths of exploration, ranging from human behavior and psychology, cybernetics and systems thinking. Jeremy's schooling and early career focused on print design and branding, then shifted from experiential moment-making toward user experience, and is now focusing on designing enterprise systems and approaches that enable those moments and experiences. For the past 10 years, Jeremy has been working in the healthcare technology space and is constantly looking for ways to enable evolved experiences for all participants in the healthcare ecosystem. Outside of work, Jeremy enjoys running long distances and testing performance, nutrition, hydration and recovery approaches on himself.
Kevin Braun has over 20 years of leadership experience managing teams of UX designers and developers. In that time the work he has done has helped improve user experiences for world-class companies including Google, Samsung, Rolex as well as many smaller companies. Along with his professional experience, he has more than ten years of experience teaching college-level user-centered design.
His book, From Chaos to Concept - A Team Oriented Approach to Designing World Class Products and Experiences was an Amazon #1 new release in UX back in 2021 and has done well since its launch in South Korea back in 2022.
Sergio Trevino is a creative-thinking manufacturing engineer with a deep passion for problem-solving by design. He graduated from UANL, Nuevo Leon State public university, as a Manufacturing Engineer with a minor in Product Design. Sergio is currently working on getting an MBA at Jack Welch Management University. He wants to help everyone use their resources better, deliver a manufacturable product to reach all the places, and still provide nice-to-see results. Sergio always strives to go beyond expectations to leverage operations with what he is learning, and designing. Moreover, develop business with his passions: manufacturing, design, and leadership.
Amy Reyes is currently serving as the Director of User Experience at Light & Wonder, where she leads a global, cross-functional team in creating user interfaces and systems for the online gaming industry. With a strategic mindset, strong leadership skills, and a passion for usability,
Amy has successfully implemented user-centered design strategies across diverse industries, including gaming, hospitality, and travel. Her dedication to exceptional customer experiences, coupled with her ability to cultivate a winning team culture, has earned her high regard as a respected leader within her organization.
Rajeev Tiwari is an Entrepreneur and a Software Engineering Leader. He is a co-founder of Talentnook Inc and drives the company's Product and Engineering wings the organization. He is an engineer by nature and product is what he lives and breathes for. He has been working in the IT industry for over 22 years. Along with his gig at Talentnook, he works with Salesforce with expertise in CI/CD operations.
Andy is a pioneer of the User Experience and Service Design industry and a well-known thought leader in the design space with many writing credits and appearances at SXSW, Interaction, and TED. After an early career in interactive TV and Games, Andy shifted focus to the agency world. He joined Fjord in London in 2008 and within 18 months he had founded the Madrid studio, rapidly becoming the most in-demand agency in Spain. In 2014, he moved again to New York and took over the US operation overseeing the build of four new studios. He has since brought his talents to BCG Digital Ventures, frog, and most recently, as VP of User Experience at Early Warning Services, the makers of Zelle.
Join Juan Carlos, VP of Product at Intercare Therapy in the Fail Faster podcast as he explores the transformative power of change and the pursuit of meaningful work. From his experiences as a filmmaker to his current role as a product leader, Juan Carlos shares personal stories, insights, and lessons learned along the way. Discover how embracing new perspectives, connecting with nature, and taking risks can lead to personal and professional growth. Each episode dives deep into the intersection of creativity, leadership, and social impact, inspiring listeners to navigate their own paths and become agents of change.
Join us on the Fail Faster Podcast as we dive into the experiences and insights of Eric Erway, a seasoned product experience leader at cart.com. In this episode, Eric shares his background and path to his current role, discussing his journey through various companies and the evolution of user experience over the years. Discover how Eric's passion for human-centered design and agile methodologies drives his approach to creating seamless commerce experiences. Gain valuable insights into the challenges faced in integrating diverse products and the importance of user research in shaping successful customer journeys. Tune in to explore the intersection of old and new in the world of design and learn from Eric's stories of successes, hiccups, and the unique advantages that make cart.com stand out in the market.
Kerin Smollen, Corporate Vice President of Design Thinking and Strategy at New York Life Ventures shares her journey of over 22 years in design thinking and how it has shaped her career. Kérin leads with an open mindset of approaching a problem space with one question: How Might We? This brings the user perspective into the design process. Kérin leads with this user perspective as a driving force as she transformed the design culture at ESPN, orchestrated the World Cup experience, and is now leading cultural change and collaboration at New York Life. Learn about the importance of empathy, celebrating learning, and breaking down silos in building innovative and user-centric solutions. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in driving design thinking as a culture within organizations.
Chris Wright, is a multifaceted individual with a passion for effective communication and public relations. Fueling his commitment to lifelong learning, he is currently expanding his knowledge and skills in business leadership at Governors State University. With a career spanning 13 years in product, Chris has notably spent around 4 years at IQVIA, contributing through data analytics and research.
His expertise in recruitment, eConsent, eCOA, and decentralized clinical trials flourished during their last ~2 years at Science 37, where they focused on various essential aspects of clinical trials. Beyond their professional interests, Chris is a dedicated father to three wonderful children. In his free time, Chris enthusiastically assists his wife in owning and managing the area's best dance studio, watching Movies and TV shows and playing video games professionally.
Bhavini is a seasoned Tech Executive (CTO/VP) with over 25 years experience driving Business and Customer outcomes. She has led team transformations through different growth stages across public companies (like Microsoft) and startups (like Cruise, Headspace etc) , spanning different industries like autonomous vehicles, healthcare, wellness, enterprise, consumer social. Bhavini loves using human-centered design with streamlined automation to create experiences that improve people’s lives.
Additionally, she enjoys giving back to the community, advising C-level executives, mentoring at Techstars, First Round, Plato, and has also founded a group of Women Technology Executives in Los Angeles to support and foster this group while playing an active role in the LA CTO Forum. When she’s not working, she loves the outdoors and enjoys boogie boarding with her husband and twins.
Crystal Woodard is an accomplished Director of Enterprise UX Design & Research at Lumen Technologies, leading a global, multi-disciplinary team of product designers and UX researchers. Using her robust user experience design and research background, Crystal is helping Lumen deliver valuable experiences supporting buying and management tasks for telecom and technology products and services. Crystal has established and implemented design and research best practices within several organizations.
At Lumen, she developed a career ladder framework that supports the growth and development of her team members, resulting in multiple promotions for existing teammates. She also established a research practice that provides valuable insights and conducted numerous tactical and strategic research studies. Crystal led her team in introducing a fully digital buying experience for telecom professionals, resulting in improved user satisfaction, reduced task completion time, and increased lead generation for Sales.
In addition to her professional achievements, Crystal has a range of interests and hobbies. She enjoys traveling, binge-watching series on Netflix, being a dog mom to her Shepsky, redecorating her house, going on random weekend road trips, trying new restaurants with friends, and keeping up with her favorite blogs.
Francis is a product design leader, creative technologist, and music producer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has a diverse background in media, advertising, eCommerce, and music technology and is focused on building products that leverage AI to inspire and empower creators.
He is Head of Product Design and Research at Splice, a music creation platform and marketplace. Before joining Splice, Francis was Yahoo's Director of Product Design for Ad Innovation, where he owned product design for Native Advertising across Yahoo's Owned and Operated properties.
Francis is passionate about grooming the next generation of product designers. He is a founding industry adviser to his grad school alma mater Rutgers University Innovation Design Entrepreneurship Academy (IDEA), which provides students with practical product and design thinking training. At Yahoo, Francis served as a lead, mentor, and HBCU recruiter for the Design Associate Program.
Join us on the "Fail Faster" podcast as we dive into the world of user experience design with Christie Lenneville, Vice President of User Experience at GitLab. In this episode, Christie shares her journey from a creative writer to a UX leader, navigating the ever-evolving landscape of user experience in the fast-paced world of software development. Discover how GitLab manages to maintain cohesiveness and deliver a constant stream of new features while ensuring a seamless user experience. Additionally, explore the concept of the "papercuts team" and how reactionary design plays a crucial role in the iterative process.
Martin Koltz - he is originally from Northern Illinois, and went to the University of Illinois initially to study engineering but ended up in Aviation Human Factors. He went on to get a Masters in Human Factors from Cal State Long Beach. While he was there, he had some incredible opportunities in the Aviation industry, including some time spent at SpaceX. After he graduated, his family moved from LA to Colorado, where he stumbled into the consumer products space and started working with Charter Communications as their first dedicated UX researcher. Over the course of 5 years, he helped scale the research team from 1 to 15. Currently, Martin is working as Director of UX research at Toptal, where he started as their first research hire and has since grown into a team of 5.
Nicholas Jackson is a Creative Director living in New York City. His work is concentrated in innovation, storytelling, interactive design, advertising, product development and branding. With a passion for building and scaling creative teams, pitching creative work, and seeing projects grow from strategy all the way through to production. Nicholas focuses on tech and innovation for clients in the healthcare, tech and media space, specifically for creative areas around augmented reality, AI, web-3 and design systems.
Ashutosh Kaushik is a UX design leader originally from Mumbai, India. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and a Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Starting his career as a User Experience Designer at Ford Motors, Ashu later joined Walmart.com/Walmartlabs as an Interaction Designer, where he led multiple successful projects, including Pharmacy and Search redesigns.
He then worked at Intuit Inc, where he played a significant role in growing the apps ecosystem for Quickbooks, followed by leading the redesign of Quickbooks.com into a successful e-commerce site. In 2020, he joined ServiceNow as a Senior Group Manager Design & Research, where he established the research team and created the design system from scratch.
Currently, Ashutosh is the Director of UX at Indeed.com, leading the growth and Monetization team and driving the evolution of the business model for the billion-dollar job website.
Nick Eberhardt is the current Director of UX for RAPP Chicago — where he leads a team of UX researchers, architects and designers on the US Army account. He spent his early career as a product designer and creative director until leaving the industry, altogether, to start an urban farm in Los Angeles in 2019. Farming reminded him of what he loved so much about design and the rest is history.
Join us on the "Fail Faster" podcast as we dive into the world of healthcare innovation with our guest, Pacssu, a VP of Design at a leading healthcare startup. In this episode, we explore the challenges and triumphs of designing for customer-centric healthcare solutions. Our guest shares their personal journey from studying linguistics to becoming a design leader in the healthcare industry. Discover how they overcame visa obstacles and proved their value as a designer while gaining a deeper understanding of business, growth, and technology. We delve into the importance of seeing patients as customers, revolutionizing healthcare experiences, and driving insights for personalized care. Get inspired by their insights and learn how design thinking is reshaping the healthcare landscape. Don't miss this engaging conversation filled with valuable tips and tricks for aspiring design leaders in the healthcare space.
Nick Sheppard, Director of UX Conversation Design at Fidelity Investments is a 6-year veteran of the CAI industry who has lead design engagements for companies such as Wells Fargo, CVS Health, and various IPsoft clients. Most recently he is one of two founders in a CAI stealth-startup focused on bringing the "AI Assistant Evolution" to every day folks, via a simple design interface, community-based marketplace, and a Quantum Conversational AI infrastructure that allows customers to model conversations, not just language.
Nick Is a Native Coloradan, and received a Bachelors of Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was an ESL teacher in South Korea, and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Before getting into the Conversational AI space, Nick was a creative marketer and strategist for brands such as Icreon, eClerx, Dorot, and Todd Snyder. When he’s not traveling or working, you might find him reading Camus in one of Brooklyn’s local pubs, or scribbling in his unfinished novel.
Luke Zimbelman, Vice President Stratehy & Design at Citi is an accomplished Executive Marketing & Creative Director with a proven track record of driving business growth for Fortune 30, small businesses, and startups. He is known for his influential leadership, strategic creativity, and holistic achievement mindset that balances healthy people and high productivity. At Citi, Luke has delivered $MM revenue gains, driven GTM strategy, and redesigned flagship product lines. Luke holds a degree in Digital Media from Full Sail University and has founded and managed multiple successful digital product and service organizations. He has received honors such as SEMA 35 Under 35 for excellence in marketing production, creative direction, and strategic execution and is highly regarded by his colleagues for his creativity, empathy, and ability to build strong relationships.
We are joined by Vijay Chakravarthy, Practice Director, Service Design & Strategy at Philips, to uncover the power of service design in creating better outcomes for patients. Discover how service design goes beyond product development and empowers organizations to think holistically, drive strategic change, and enhance customer experiences. Gain insights into the challenges and successes of integrating service design concepts into established organizations and learn how personalized offerings and subscription services can transform traditional business models. Tune in for thought-provoking discussions on the intersection of design, strategy, and technology, and discover practical tips for implementing service design principles in your own organization.
Join Brianna Frank, Vice President of Product and Design at IBM Cloud, as she shares her journey and experiences in the tech industry on the Fail Faster podcast. In this episode, Brianna discusses her background, the importance of a beginner's mindset, and the challenges of product management in an era of countless ideas and limited resources. She dives into the success story of IBM Cloud satellite, a solution born out of customer feedback that led to innovations in combining cloud capabilities with on-premises workloads. Don't miss this engaging conversation packed with practical advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and product managers.
In this episode of Fail Faster Podcast, Rob Hedrick, is the Director of Product Design at American Express joins us. Rob discusses how the company allowed for flexibility and innovation, leading to the creation of a customer-centric experience from a more card-centric focus. Rob also shares his experiences working on projects, such as redesigning payment systems and voice user interface design, and how they were able to learn and grow from them. He also talks about the importance of collaboration, testing, pitching ideas, and how American Express provides a supportive culture that allows for creative thinking that leads to innovation.
On a personal note, Rob loves coffee so much that he roasts his own beans. Rob has a deep understanding of his craft and cares deeply about creating the best user experience for the users his work touches.
Naren Roy, Vice President of Product Management at Foundation Partners Group is a Product and General Management executive that has helped scale multiple successful companies through periods of hyper-growth. Deep experience building and leading small to large-sized teams (business operations, product management, general management). He combines business expertise with a technical background. He has worked in structured and unstructured teams for several years, helping companies and organizations grow, scale, and achieve their goals.
Sergi Luvish, VP of Software Development, HealthEdge joins us to share about his unique journey that led him to where he is today. He is getting ready to start a series of educational bites called Modular Leadership where he will be sharing practical nuggets of executable leadership. Sergi believes in hiring overqualified people for jobs to get better value and apply skills cross functionally.
Join host Vandana as she interviews Maureen Carter, VP Design/UX, Digital Brands, Experiential Design at BET Networks, ( a subsidiary of Paramount). Maureen shares her fascinating journey from a family with deep artistic roots to becoming a trailblazer in the world of design. Her experiences in the music industry and digital advertising shaped her perspective on the ever-evolving landscape of design, technology, and creativity. Maureen's insights on the future of design, the impact of digital advancements, and the importance of staying connected to multiple industries are very insightful. This episode also gives valuable knowledge delving into the exciting possibilities of web 3.0, the metaverse, NFT and beyond.
This Fail Faster podcast episode features Yasmin, the Global Director of Products at RIA Money Transfer. Yasmin talks about her background, her love for product management, and how her experiences as an immigrant led her to her current role. She discusses her role in the company, her team, and how she helps to bring services to immigrants who want to send money to their families overseas. Yasmin shares the opportunities and improvements she sees in product management, and how she ensures that projects are delivered successfully.
Join us on the Fail Faster podcast as we dive into the world of product development and innovation with John Guillaume, the former head of design and innovation at Comcast Business. In this episode, John shares his insights on what makes a product great and why some products end up being average. He emphasizes the importance of being true to the promise to the customer. With his extensive experience in sales and product management, John sheds light on how to accelerate go to market initiatives succussfully. Discover the strategies and key principles that can help you create exceptional products and achieve market success.
Kelly Bowker, Director of Experience Design at EverQuote, a Boston based online provider of insurance policies joins us as she explores the role of luck in professional success, Kelly emphasizes that luck is not only about chance, but it can also involve favorable circumstances and events that work for or against individuals. She highlights the importance of self-reflection, being aware of one's strengths and limitations, and recognizing what one has control over. She shares personal experiences and insights on managing teams, she stresses the need to prioritize internal teams for effective job performance and regularly assess one's job alignment with personal values and potential. Kelly is reflecting on how she becomes a part of someone else's story and describes how people are always seeking the next shiny object and how the expectation of delight decreases over time as things become normal. She brings to surface, how humans crave change, even while also desiring stability.
Shardool Pandit is VP, Head of Design at OneMain Financial, a leader in offering non-prime customers responsible access to credit and is dedicated to improving the financial well-being of their customers. Shardool brings his visual design, digital art direction and story-telling skills to his role at One Main. He is excited about leading digital transformations of some of the key functions to enable a more customer driven experience. Shardool is elevating the performance of the internal tools like easily bundling products to offer more value to the customers while adding new features to enable self service for the end customers. He believes in everyone bringing their creative awesomeness to look at a traditional industry with a lens of a startup to bring education and new approaches.
Jessica Hall, VP of Design at CoStar, a leading provider of commercial real estate information, analytics and online marketplaces. Jessica also is a Co-Author of The Product Mindset: Succeed in the Digital Economy by Changing the Way Your Organization Thinks" helps product leaders and teams with approaches from a bold, new direction. Jessica reflects on how she went from being scared to being confident in her skills when she switched her career. Why doesn't everyone need to be an SME? How creative people can take feedback to grow? She shares her learnings from situations when things went terribly wrong during the testing phases. Today, she is enabling multi-billion dollar commercial real estate transactions online by understanding the complex buyer needs and fostering trust with the right data at various stages of the buying cycle.
Daan is a UX leader who has been in the field for 23 years building UX teams at a variety of companies, large and small. He is a UX Designer and Researcher by heart with a passion for starting and building UX Design and Research teams. He has 23 years experience designing successful consumer and enterprise web, mobile, and desktop apps, brands, and hardware devices.
For the past 15 years he has been starting, growing and leading diverse, multi-disciplinary UX teams, and defining and executing on corporate product vision and strategy. Mostly recently as the VP of Product Design, UX Research and Technical Writing at Axon and before that at Head of UX Design & Research at Qualtrics. Daan is originally from the Netherlands where he went to school for Industrial Design Engineering. He moved to the United States in 2000 to start his career.
Jason Pace, Head of UX Design, Core UX Community & Culture at Google is a UX and design executive with 25 years of experience leading teams to deliver category-defining experiences for some of the world's best known brands, including Microsoft's Windows and the Halo video game franchise. Jason's product design journey started in the mid-90s as a web designer in Microsoft's Developer Division, a role that led him to build one of the company's first full-stack dedicated UX teams. Jason most recently served as the Head of UX Design for Google's UX Community and Culture team, an organization chartered with increasing the impact of the world's largest UX organization.
Debbie Levitt, MBA, is the CXO of Delta CX, and since the mid-1990s has been a CX and UX consultant focused on strategy, research, training, and Human-Centered Design/User-Centered Design. She’s a change agent and business design consultant focused on helping companies of all sizes transform towards customer-centricity while using principles of Agile and Lean.
She has worked in various CX and UX leadership and individual contributor roles at companies including Wells Fargo, Macy’s, StepStone, Sony Mobile, and Constant Contact. In the 2010s, San Francisco UX and marketing agencies had Debbie on speed dial. She completed projects for Traction, Fjord, LIFT, Rauxa, ROI·DNA, and Fiddlehead.
Clients have given her the nickname, “Mary Poppins,” because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs, and flies away to her next adventure.
Her new book, “Customers Know You Suck,” (2022) is the customer-Centricity how-to manual. Start investigating what’s holding you back from improving customer-centricity. Learn how to be value-led: how much value we can frequently create for potential and current customers. In 2016, she became an O’Reilly author, but has since chosen to self-publish, and now has her own publishing imprint, Delta CX Media.
Outside of CX work, and sometimes during CX work, Debbie enjoys singing symphonic prog goth metal, opera, and New Wave. You can also catch her on the Delta CX YouTube channel.
Karishma Lalwani, Senior Director of Product Management, Platform Scalability Apps is a technology leader, keynote speaker, early startup investor and a mentor at Salesforce, a top cloud CRM software company. She has over 18 years of international work experience working in India, UK and US (where she currently resides) helping enterprises design and build software applications to digitise their business. She is a mother of two young kids, a 5 year old boy and a newborn girl. She believes in servant leadership philosophy built on the belief that the most effective leaders strive to serve others, rather than accrue power or take control.
For over two decades, Dave Skuratowicz has been leading Product Design teams in creating products for companies that include Google, Apple, Disney, and BlueJeans by Verizon. For many years, he has been developing his skills in preparation for this monumental time in history: when AI is empowering us to create products that change everything.
Suhas Reddy, Senior Vice President of Product at Pathward, is passionate about bringing human centricity to all things finance. In his current role, he is focused on developing human impact solutions in fintech, payments, tax and commercial lending at a federally chartered US bank focused on financial inclusion. He was previously Sr Director of Product at Fannie Mae, a Fortune 25 mortgage banking company where he managed several product teams and lead digital mortgage strategy and customer experience design.
Suhas holds a master’s degree in management & information systems and has completed the Executive leadership program at MIT Sloan School of Management. Previously, He completed his 10 + 2 at Hyderabad Public School and graduated with BTech degree in Engineering.
Stacy Holmstedt, Director of Product Design at Progressive Leasing, a leading provider of in-store, ecommerce, and app-based point-of-sale lease-to-own solutions that provide transparent and competitive payment options intended to help credit challenged customers achieve merchandise ownership. Stacy shares her interesting journey from journalism to visual design to product design. She shares the deep systemic challenges that she has experienced as she walked her new career path after 40. Uxers are like sales people who often need to sell to people who think they don't need UX. She also touches upon an interesting perspective about the credibility of titles in today's world.
Mark Villalovos, Executive Director, Zenon Management Consulting joins us to share some amazing stories from the trenches of delivering creative experiences from his career at Disney. He shares how the creation begins behind these experiences by unpacking what a brand means and how a brand should behave with its customers. On the flip side, what does the brand want its customer to experience emotionally? Does the brand create a safe space for the customers to feel comfortable? What do failed experiments look like and how do you learn from them? You don't want to miss how Mark brought Disney to Dentistry. He also shares some great tips about how you can use ChatGPT to match your skills to the next job.
Freeda Johnson, Director of Product Offering - Honeywell General Aviation and Bendixking joins us to share her very unique journey from being a commercial pilot to an aviation-focused product leader who brings a lot of first-hand experience from being one of the personas for whom she now builds the products. Freeda talks about the challenges of designing along with strict safety and compliance regulations, how do these products touch the Pilot and the peripheral persona? What are the key things to consider as they assess the value of features? How do you build small, fail smart, and get to market quicker? Her passion is to build products that truly add value in terms of sustainability and contribute to a world with a safer aviation future.
Sneha Narahalli is a technology leader who is driving the transformation of the industry through innovative and simple product development. Her upbringing in India was in a family of writers, with both her parents being notable literary figures, and she has always utilized her creativity to achieve targeted outcomes. After moving to the United States to pursue her master's degree at Carnegie Mellon University a decade ago, she has been leading the development of next-generation strategies for companies such as Sears, Walmart, and Sephora. She is currently responsible for overseeing all aspects of product development, including digital, physical stores, data, and marketing technology at Sephora. Despite being an introvert and having to adapt to a new culture, Sneha has managed to stay true to her authentic self while also increasing her efficiency and output by learning and unlearning. She strongly believes that the first step in effecting change is to raise awareness of the basic biases that women face in any environment, and she is committed to working together to overcome these biases and ultimately eradicate them. Sneha recognizes the power of the written word and intends to utilize it to create a positive impact.
Janet Covey, VP, Head of Design Operations and Design Systems at Bakkt, has been involved in design throughout her life with a background that is as varied and as the changes to our tech world. She is a seasoned creative and business professional with over two decades of experience as a design and people leader solving complex business problems that not only make a difference, but also leave a lasting impact on the organization. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, Janet draws upon her love of the outdoors combined with traveling to unique places around the world to create a mindset that helps her teams open their minds and build great products. Janet has been the go-to person for leading teams and organizations through change with a unique blend of empathy, vision, strategy, execution, and a knack for building strong partnerships. She develops cross-functional and creative processes that not only shape the culture of the design team but also inspire everyone to do great work.
A seasoned product leader, startup advisor, and speaker, Govind Wakhlu, joins us for an insightful conversation about his exciting journey of self-discovery as a leader. Govind shares how continuous learning and unlearning at speed correlate to business success at a corporate and individual level. What do companies need to focus on as they navigate dynamic markets? How can we achieve clarity of purpose by aligning individual success with that of the organization? Govind shares great tools and tips for leadership behavior that fosters authenticity, trust, and a true human connection leading to a culture of belonging.
Can you imagine the macro impact any business could create if all individuals in the organization were to execute with a high sense of belonging?
Ashley Park is a former design head of Customization and Personalization UX at Google. She continues expanding her territory as an entrepreneur and a professor for meaningful contributions to art and design communities. Ashley's creative endeavor has followed her passion for crafting a lifestyle product that changes people's perspective toward technologies and helps build trust.
Gretchen Rodriguez, Chief Product Officer at Crediverso is an Entrepreneurial-minded Product Leader with experience designing and launching global financial and non-financial products in multiple areas such as Fintech, e-commerce, Cybersecurity, Identity & Trust.
She is a Computer Science Engineer and has developed her professional career in areas like Product development, Business growth, and Tech Consulting. She is building a one-stop financial solution for Hispanics in the US and has previously worked for other big companies like eBay and Santander Bank.
Stuart Silverstein,Director, Service Design & UX at Corebridge Financial with over 20 years of design experience. His focus as a designer is to make work better for both design teams, internal employees, or end users doing repetitive or complex tasks. He has worked both agency side for brands like T-Mobile, Mattel, CiCi’s Pizza, Mr Cooper and more and in-house for companies like LegalZoom, Fandango, and REX Real Estate, as well as his current position at Corebridge Financial (which was previously AIG), where he serves as Director of Service Design and UX, working across technologies including web, enterprise apps, voice and mobile.
Amanda Willis, Portfolio head of UX Design for Authentication, KYC, and ID platform at U.S. Bank joins us to share her unique path from Journalism to UX Design. Amanda was living and breathing agile at its core as she designed the front page breaking news by telling the stories in a different way. She was in her journalism prime when the Obama election news made its rounds in the media. Amanda brings valuable design principles, process discipline, and reliability from being on the front line to her role as a Design leader handling critical security and authentication products and platforms at US Bank. She is passionate about having a deep connection with her team outside of work and is looking forward to embarking on massive initiatives that involve changing deep-rooted customer behaviors towards better experiences and outcomes.
Emily Schmidt, Lead, Behaviour Design at ATB Financial is an applied behavioural scientist who helps companies use behavioural science and behavioural economics principles to create better client experiences, services and products. Emily currently leads the behavioural practice at ATB Financial, where she collaboratively stood up the organization’s behavioural department. She delivers value across the organization by identifying objectives, designing interventions and consulting on business problems to create lasting behaviour change amongst clients and team members. With a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing and a Master of Arts in Behavioural Economics, Emily’s current area of focus is client behavior and understanding the unconscious factors that drive client decision making. Emily’s research centers specifically on the heuristics at play in consumer perceptions and likelihood to advocate for a brand. Prior to working in behavioural science, Emily spent over 10 years as a senior marketer within the tourism and environmental education industries where she crafted marketing strategies rooted in consumer psychology and behavioural signaling to promote and deliver exceptional experiences. She has led multi-disciplinary teams spanning paid media, earned media, influencer marketing, owned content, social media, digital marketing and B2B marketing to deliver integrated marketing programs which span the consumer journey and drive results. Emily passionately believes in understanding consumer psychology to design experiences, brands, and communications that resonate with audiences. Emily has served on various advisory committees across industry and academia, and has spoken at conferences and sessions across the marketing, client experience and behavioural science domains to help deepen human-centric thinking and foster the emerging behavioural design community.
Vikash has over 15 years of professional experience in the Technology industry, and he loves solving complex problems at scale. He has a bachelor’s degree in Technology and MBA in Marketing & Strategy. He tried different professions before discovering his passion for Product Management. He started as a Software Engineer at Accenture, then worked as a Consulting Manager at Cognizant, Sr. Product Manager at Amazon (Fortune 2 Company), Principal Product Manager at Flavorcloud and currently he is a Director of Product Management at Walmart (Fortune 1 Company). He is very passionate about mentoring and coaching his team, bringing out the best in them at work and making a difference by building products customer love!
Jaladhi is a UX design leader with 17 years of experience in delivering products people love. He leads the Product Design, User Research, and Technical & UX Writing teams at Braze, a customer engagement platform. Before joining Braze, he was leading an amazing team of designers across LinkedIn Feed, Video, Creators, News, Events, and Search. He is passionate about Design’s role in driving innovation and delivering outsize value to the business as well as building a collaborative and growth-oriented design culture to allow people to create their best work.
Raghu has over 22 years of experience leading technology initiatives across consumer internet, retail and eAuction; conceiving and implementing technology products and high transactional platforms for Internet Retailer top 100 websites. For the last couple of years, he was leading the digital transformation initiatives at CapitalOne, Target and JCPenney, moving from monolith packaged eCommerce solutions (Oracle/IBM) to home-grown microservices, cloud based architecture.
Currently he is leading the engineering for enteprise Personalzation/Experiementation, Content Management, Enterprise ClickStream and analytics platforms. In his previous job, he spent all his time working on every facet of Retail from eCommerce, Enterprise Price/Promo systems, Item Management Systems,Assortment Planning, Inventory management systems for Internet retailer top 100 retailers. Raghu holds a Masters degree in Computer applications, India. He started his career as a software engineer and throughout his career, has held a wide range of roles as lead engineer, Architect, Engineering Manager, Capability Product Owner.
Erin O'Donnell Howard, Executive Director of Product and Design at Charles River Labs joins us to share her unique journey of leading this research & life sciences org through a huge design transformation where she not only built a new design function but also built a design system ground up with this new team. Erin unpacks how she springboarded a design system keeping the need for consistent design for the various products at CRL at the center, adding the fundamental componentization and tokenization to a living and breathing process with user stories that translate from the design boards to the engineers code base much quickly. Driving excitement among the teams to achieving operational efficiencies so designers can focus on the actual solution and the experience they are after, away from the noise of wasting time redesigning small reusable components. If you are wondering if your org is ripe to execute a Design System or how to measure the performance of your current design system, this episode is for you.
Dan Reber, Sr. AVP Healthcare Solutions Architect at EXL, a business evolution partner who tailor solutions to make better business decisions and drive more intelligence to their customers. Dan shares his journey from digitizing the manual spreadsheet data into his first dashboard and the evolution of dashboards as products keeping the persona user matrix with information like number of users, frequency of logins, retention rate, drop off analysis and more at the center of these designs. Dan is excited to drive more AI and ML solutions into the future of Healthcare systems to make a positive impact on serving the needs of their customers.
Mark is a design and innovation leader, currently with Visa, with over 20 years diverse background in Experience and Innovation Strategy, Integrated New Product Design, Service Design, User Experience, Ethnographic Research, Design Thinking and Design Management. He helps organizations envision and plan the future while designing and executing an innovative, sustainable product and service portfolio. He specializes in connecting business goals to user experience, product, and innovation strategy, while forming and leading teams and collaborations ensuring successful implementation. He has extensive experience consulting for, and managing teams within, top-tier brands delivering validated insights and breakthrough ideas grounded in both qualitative and quantitative approaches.
Ingvald is a hands-on, award-winning design leader who has helped innovate and commercialize over 100 products, services and experiences across a variety of industries. Ingvald is currently the Sr. Director of User Experience at RVO health, a joint venture between United Healthcare and Red Ventures. Previously, as the co-founder and partner at Pull, he led the Strategy practice. He leverages his multicultural and cross disciplinary background to help companies innovative, and has built cross disciplinary teams and implemented User Centered Design methodologies at companies such as BMW Designworks, Optum and PepsiCo. Ingvald is a graduate of the ArtCenter College of Design with a degree in product design and holds numerous awards and over 30 international patents. He has held speaking engagements at Harvard, USC and Pratt, judged design awards and mentored at UCLA.
Michael Tischer, Director of Design & Innovation at Associated Bank joins us to share how he is creating improved digital customer experiences in a restrictive banking environment. He shares insights about approaching crafting the solutions for the customers leading with the data and the continuous knowledge derived from the customer data. Michael believes that everyone should get the experience they deserve and expect from a digital product. This passion leads him to pay attention to detail and refine the solution he creates to express a positive spirit that goes beyond a great UI and UX to create continued value delivery as a service.
Sean Luitjens is the Vice President of Product for Korn Ferry’s Talent hub Suite.
Sean has an extensive background working in strategic roles across organizations holding positions in Product Development, System Architecture, Global Sales, Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Benchmarking, and M&A.
Prior to Korn Ferry, Sean held leadership positions at AIRINC and eQuest and was a Principal with the Information Product Solutions division of Mercer, where he managed the global benefits benchmarking business. His background also includes roles at Monster where, he was the Director of Product, Strategy and Acquisitions and a Product Manager and Developer for the interactive businesses of Fidelity Capital. In addition to his professional career, Sean also serves on the board of directors for two additional non-profit organizations.
Sean has worked with clients and partners as well as spoken on a wide range of topics including but not limited to total rewards, pay equity, global mobility, recruitment, compensation and benefits methodology and trends, as well as merger & acquisition strategies. He is a 1992 graduate of Florida State University. When not working, Sean can likely be found in the great outdoors hitting the trails, climbing, or partaking in a triathlon.
Ben Martin is a design leader, who has worked in some form of product or marketing design for over 15 years. Spending most of his career in agencies and startups, he has worked on everything from content design, product design, brand strategy, product marketing, and more. Right now, he's Director of UX Design Systems at Intuit Mailchimp, leading the team that creates the components, patterns, and tools that product teams use to build and ship awesome customer experiences.
Amberdeep Aurora (or Amber) currently leads the Product Management function for Whirlpool Corporation's eCommerce Business, spanning six different digital properties. He started programming at the age of 10, when a computer used to be a giant keyboard you hooked up to your television set. With a Bachelor's in Computer Engineering in India and an MBA from the prestigious Kelley School of Business, his career has spanned software development, P&L management, Product Marketing and Product Management across both physical and digital products. He currently lives in St Joseph, Michigan with his wife, Poonam and enjoys playing racket sports and practicing music in his spare time.
Khyati Shah, Director Experience Design at Rocket Companies, a publicly traded company involved in many different industries, including mortgages, fintech, real estate, automotive and more. Khyati shares her interesting journey looking back from being a leader who is designing the future of lending platforms today to where she started as a young artist who tried her hand at Advertising in the cutthroat competitive markets of Mumbai to painting murals on cafe walls to T-shirt illustrations to finding her first break in enterprise product design. Always staying hungry for what she finds fulfillment in and that is one motto she has as a leader even today.
Collin Keen, Director of Collaborative Design at SEI a Financial services company delivering technology and investment solutions that connect the financial services industry. Collin shares his journey of almost 17 years at SEI that evolved to his current role where he is able to advocate and execute design thinking in a 50-year-old enterprise. He shares how failing fast as you are doing front-end research is much more economical than failing late which might result in a loss of both front and back-end dev costs. Collin is enjoying seeing the awareness of the value design can bring as a result of his efforts.
Alex Awn’s 20-year career has taken the winding path from gluing his fingers together and stabbing himself with an x-acto’s as a young graphic designer to leading teams of designers and researchers for multi-billion dollar corporations. The journey has moved lock-step with the evolution of technology as he started in print and saw that snowball into the web, phones, vehicle infotainment, and mixed reality experiences. Alex has led many multi-disciplinary teams over his career, learned from his successes and failures, and honed a unique style of management that serves him well to this day.
Shanelle is an author, inventor, and empathetic product design leader with over 17 years of design experience where she has won awards for her design work. She currently works at M&T Bank where she’s helping them digitally transform their institutional client services space by automating workflows and designing software that will allow the bank to deliver their products and services at scale. Her passion is to help build high-performing design teams by crafting best-in-class employee experiences. She is a top-rated mentor on ADPList, with over 40 rave reviews, where she mentors designers at all levels to successfully navigate their careers. Shanelle loves to travel and interior design. When she’s not working, she’s designing her 1950s brick house to reflect a Hollywood glam vibe.
Josh Lee is a product design and UX leader with experience across multiple industries focused on bridging gaps between management and design.
Scott Taylor, Director of Product Development at Fiserv shares with us how he is creating great customer experiences for delinquent financial customers using his unique blend of strategic, technical, operational, and analytical skills and adding empathy for the users to create immediate stickiness and growth. He strongly believes in post-launch feedback feeding into continuous improvement of any product as he gets satisfaction when his users talk about their great experience with others. Scott shares the crux of his wisdom from being in Collections for more than 2 decades: Approximately 4 out of 100 customers are delinquent on their payments, what causes this behavior and how can we support the people to get out of this mess? This deep thinking translates into his work as he shapes new platforms and products to bring people toward better financial health.
Rachel DeFriend Design Director and Adam Zuckerman, Director, Product Development and Modernization join us today from USAA which is a provider of insurance, banking, financial products, and advice focused on the Military community. Rachel and Adam bring a super interesting fireside chat about how design and business perspectives intersect to create better user-centric solutions in a traditionally slow-moving insurance world. They bring their day-to-day work scenarios to share how true collaboration can bring speed and ease to complex decisions. Measuring and tracking progress and impacts surfaces the true value of design for this team so they are able to continue to serve their customers powerfully by providing them with the right information to make complex decisions with ease. Their work is focused on making their customers "whole" with a promise of recovery from any major life incident.
Vishal Sharma is an Engineering Leader with diversified experience across all facets of Software delivery. Currently, working as Chief Architect for Regulatory Tech Platform within Broadridge. Vishal is a FinTech enthusiast with a passion for simplifying technology architecture and delivery. Currently spearheading a major transformation initiative. In the past, he has worked as a Product Owner of the API management ecosystem for a major global bank. He is a sports enthusiast and has participated in regional Badminton and Ping-Pong tournaments.
Ann Meneses AVP Design Lead at LPL Financial is featured in this episode. LPL Financial is a leader in the retail financial advice market enabling independent Brokers to provide personalized guidance to millions of American families seeking wealth management, retirement planning, financial planning, and asset management solutions.
Ann shares how she breaks complex information into a simpler digestible visual story designed to convey smaller pieces of information. She brings her expertise in running complicated political campaigns to translating complex technical medical information into appetizing bite-size nuggets to her role today. Ann is a huge advocate of design thinking culture where the voice of the user is at the center of the work her team produces.
Srinivas Paluri, CTO at RentBase and a visionary technical leader for tomorrow. RentBase is a brand new startup aiming to be the first all-in-one platform that helps Real Estate agents and brokers organize and track all their rental deals, save hours of time qualifying and matching their leads to listings, and identify future sales from their existing rental deals. Srinivas, shares stories from his recent experience of being at Zillow for 16 years creating new teams and engineering the most robust suite of tools for buyers, sellers, landlords, renters, agents, and other home professionals for the nation's top real estate website. He is now focused to hit a repeat again with his brand new concept to revolutionize the renting experience.
Landon Stanfield Director of Product Management, Digital Payments at Everi Holdings Inc. joins us for this episode. Everi is a diverse collection of artists, developers, accountants, marketers and visionaries committed to giving casino patrons and operators a premium experience on the casino floor. Landon brings his logical problem-solving skills and Fintech expertise to this mix of creators. At Everi, he is applying his deep learnings from working unsecured loans, home equity credit lines, credit cards, acquisitions, and new product launches and combining this knowledge with an understanding of the psychology of consumer decisions. Landon is super excited to be part of the team who are pushing boundaries to self-service models enabling a cashless payment ecosystem where complex transactions happen easily.
Jon Walters is the Director of Software and Control User Experience at Rockwell Automation. Jon has a passion for designing software user experiences for some of the most challenging environments in the world. In these environments, it's critical to have good situational awareness as it can be a difference between life and death for the users and operators. Jon believes in ruthlessly cutting unnecessary elements like flashy backgrounds, animations, and wrong colors and knowing what "bad" looks like as he designs responsibly. He shares how these manufacturing plant environments are evolving with the newer generations and becoming more multi-tenant solutions. Jon is always looking holistically at users, operators, and maintenance personas and how their multiple workflows interact within the software to serve their individual needs powerfully.
Mitadru Dey is a pro bono career coach who helps early to mid-career professionals (typically with less than 10 years of experience) achieve their professional goals. He is a tenured Vice President in a top global financial services institution with 17 years of experience managing people and guiding them to success. He sets high expectations and goals for his team, while simultaneously providing the knowledge and frameworks they need to succeed. He has authored many articles on professional development, a few of which have been published on the Acoustic Post, LinkedIn, Medium, and SociallyDesi websites. He has also been featured on podcasts across US, India, and UK to talk about career management in today’s world.
Stephen Fritz is the Executive Design Director at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Stephen talks about his path of growth spanning over 20 years as a Design leader shaping some of the world’s largest brands. He is an expert in Design Thinking, Human Centered Design, and Agile. He shares how he combined his interest in sketching and music to bring order to his creativity which brought him amazing opportunities to advance his design career in the 70s and 80s with brands like Viacom, MTV, Comedy Central, AMC, Nickelodeon, Honeywell, Deloitte, SONY and many more. His failures thought him that finding great criticism is highly invaluable in one career path if you can get over the hurt. He shares a lot about where the market is heading and how designers have to shift their mindset to stay relevant.
Kevin Erdner, Senior Director of Product Management at LabCorp joins us. He takes us back in time to when his career started in the Media industry, where he won an Emmy award for software he helped create. After that glamorous success, Kevin aligned his skills with a purpose that could make a deeper impact. Now Kevin brings his passion for creating software with a purpose and his skills from performing improv comedy to his role to unlock the creativity in every team member, creating inspired, fun cultures to transform the product management team from good to great.
May Wu, Senior Director, Carelon, a data and analytics-driven platform delivering clinical insights so each person can access proven value-based care. May unpacks her collection of learnings from executing AI/ML solutions in different industries from start-ups to enterprises. She is always curious about where an insight makes a direct impact on innovation, efficiency, or the bottom line. May shares how she is running the AI practice as a business within the enterprise with a result-oriented mindset of taking data-driven strategy to the next level, either packaged as products for the market or as an actionable call to action. Bringing together the right components to deliver a personalized Healthcare experience and building proactive people-first care models, digital tools, and services to provide better care for their members.
Shravan Chandrasekaran heads Product Management at Marsh McLennan, the world’s leading professional services firm in the areas of risk, strategy, and people. Shravan shares his winding path to this role and how he drives the process of product discovery and delivery with different functions in the enterprise keeping them aligned toward one goal. He is set to transform his current challenges into major growth in 2023.
David Kazaryan, Head of Product Design at CreditWise at Capital One joins us to share his very interesting path where his passion for art forms like paintings, music, and graphic design got expression in the advertising industry. Followed by a fascination for products when the iPhone launched and app experiences took us all over by storm. David became super interested in user behavior and how providing personalized context could influence user behavior and experience. Taking the same principle of providing context can be a game-changer for designers and the effectiveness of their work. When product leaders provide business context to their design teams they operate at the level of business partners and stakeholder buy-ins become a piece of cake resulting in a successful and integrated business model.
Amy Pogue Brady is the VP of Service Design Strategy at US Bank joins us to share her very intriguing journey leading to her current role. In this episode, Amy unpacks her process of uncovering hidden patterns, discovering symptoms, arriving at deep-rooted problems, and then solving them. She is not afraid to be vulnerable as she opens up to share her experience through the tough years of her career as she was evolving into the leader she is today. This episode shines the light on some real challenges most leaders have faced and have hopefully come out on the other side molded into more compassionate humans and leaders.
Ken Hubbell is a pragmatic futurist. He designs for tomorrow and builds for today. He has a Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design, video production, and game design with a Masters in Instructional Technology and Innovation. He has been developing software tools and educational products for over three decades. Ken is currently Chief Product Officer for Soffos.ai where they are developing natural language processing products and low-code/no code AI components.
Teil Wise is a creative problem solver who is committed to building positive and collaborative cultures that allow dedicated, effective teams to thrive. He combines the passion for human-centered design with a fascination for technology to inspire those around him to create engaging and memorable experiences. Professionally, he has over 15 years of leadership experience in the design industry and have worked with some of the world’s most recognizable brands including IKEA, Adidas, ebay, Sotheby's, Lysol, Vanguard, Georgia Pacific, Nickelodeon, Comcast, MLB, NASCAR, ESPN, Toys R Us, Babies R Us and Tumi. he motivates the people around him to realize their strengths, embrace their passions and hone their craft. He loves going on adventures with his family, enjoys trying new and interesting cuisines and conducting impromptu photo shoots. Once the wife and kids are fast asleep, he can be found geeking-out over vintage sci-fi and horror movies as well as his collections of guitar pedals, vinyl records and 8-bit video games.
Anuradha Shetty is a passionate Product Director at Nationwide Insurance. She joins us to share her story of why she likes being in the product space. Anuradha shares how she approaches the fine balance of handling complex projects keeping the user impact and business goals. She is always figuring out new ways to deliver work faster by keeping her teams engaged and onboard even in the chaos. Let's dive into Anu's behind the scene world of enhancing the billing and payment experience for the end users she serves everyday.
Valerie Vacante is an award-winning global innovator; she is the VP of Solutions Innovation for Dentsu, where she uncovers cultural trends, commerce dynamics and emerging technologies to shape next-generation product innovations, and solutions impacting the way people connect and experience in the physical and digital world. Val is the co-creator behind Dentsu NXT Space, a co-space for rapidly realizing the future of the metaverse in collaboration with Microsoft and HeadOffice.space. Val is also the co-creator of ShopNXT™ — Dentsu’s retail innovations focused on helping brands create more personalized shopping experiences increasing loyalty, sales, and customer joy. Additionally, Val architected and launched NXT Intelligence™ an innovation platform featuring 12 technology, innovation, and brand solutions designed to rapidly explore, evaluate and evolve business growth opportunities. She is also the Founder of the strategy and innovation firm Collabsco; where she pioneered award-winning digital products and connected experiences across IoT, AR, VR, voice, robotics, and the first connected play landscape featured in VentureBeat, The Drum, VRScout, and more. Val has recently been named one of the Top 25 Women in Tech by PCR magazine, The Most Powerful Women in Technology, 2022 by CIO Views and 40 Over Forty.
Denise Burchell is a creative leader with over 20 years of experience in human centered design. She has been on the Salesforce Design team for almost 3 years, where she champions Strategy Design and Relationship Design practices, and creates content and experiences to share them. Denise has a unique background, with a combination of consulting, product, and entrepreneurship roles that included 7 years at IDEO. Her sweet spot is in building and nurturing strategic teams that work at the intersection of design and business, where technology enables relationships with brands and other people. Denise lives life with intention, and loves bringing that lens to work.
Derek Boman is a design leader working in the fintech space. He’s currently Director of Product Design at Avant, whose mission focuses on providing credit products to households underserved by the traditional banking system. In the evenings, he also teaches a 24-week online “Intro to UX” course. He’s passionate about building and developing design teams, customer-centricity, and lifelong learning. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife and 2 boys.
Isabel Harvey, Director of Innovation Experience Design at Travelers insurance joins us to share her unique journey from an Industrial designer to evolving into a design thinking practitioner. She connects her passion for a deep understanding of her stakeholders to curate areas of the most impact, she brings creative fun along the way as she executes her vision with her teams to create global products. Isabel is someone who embraces her diversity and thinks about the nuances of users from across the world as a responsible designer. There are some amazing resources she has shared in this episode that you don't want to miss.
Erica is a Senior Director of Product at Warner Bros. Discovery. As a product manager, one of her obsessions is to fix all things inefficient - whether it is getting the most value out of a lean team at work or finding the best route to a restaurant. Her passion in tech while studying Computer Science brought her across the border from Canada to Silicon Valley. Her background in software development and consulting uniquely positions her to see the beauty of technology and the importance of the customer’s voice in driving innovation strategy. She vows to be an advocate for her users and the quarterback for her products.
Pranathi Vangeepuram is a Software Engineer with over 16 years of experience. A passionate technologist who likes to think out of the box and challenge the status quo. Currently leading product development of Digital Trial Management Suite (DTMS) for clinical trials at IQVIA. Her experience includes Commercial product development, legacy modernization and optimizing internal business operations leveraging technology. She enjoys building,mentoring and motivating teams. She was born and brought up in India, Pursued Bachelors in Electronics & Communications and Masters in Computer Science in the US. She is a Fitness freak ,Started biking and walking groups to have fun and workout at the same time with her close circle.
Michael Torpea joined Mastercard in February of 2017 as a UX contractor. Prior to Mastercard, he was an Interactive Art Director at Ansira Engagement Marketing and ran his own small web development business. During his tenure at Mastercard he helped the company mature the practice of UX within the Mastercard Technology group, create a positive culture within the Product Experience Design team, and establish operating model, design ops & design research playbooks for PXD. When he’s not keeping busy with his wife, 4 daughters, 2 dogs, & a cat in a pear tree, you can find him fishing, learning some new technology or playing guitar.
Sean Brown, a creative designer with over 20 years of experience in digital, interactive, and web design; a thought leader in digital content and storytelling. Before joining Courageous, Sean was the creative/product director for Condé Nast’s Style.com and Fairchild’s Fashion Media Women’s World Daily. During his tenure at Condé Nast under his design direction he helped them bridge the gap from print to digital with the development of their first native IOS app for Style.com in 2007, the first digital magazine edition for GQ in 2009 and the award-winning Epicurious cooking App, because of its success, it was selected by Steve Jobs to be one of a few, launch partners for the first iPad. Sean has received multiple awards for his work in UX UI and design including 2 Webby Awards. An Asme, and Condé Nast’s first ever Innovator of the Year for his work with GQ. Sean’s work at Courageous has earned him an Edward R Murrow, Silver Cannes Lion, and the first Anthem Award Silver for Diversity, Equity&;Inclusion, to name a few. Sean has been on the forefront of the adoption of emerging technology and leading ways to integrate it into his creative work. He continues to grow his work with purpose driving experiential design and event based marketing.
Milton Jackson was a native of Jamaica and was raised in Hartford, Connecticut. He holds a B.S. in History and Social Sciences from Eastern Connecticut State University and a Master’s in Technology Entrepreneurship from the University of Maryland’s Clark School of Engineering. Milton has created experiences within multiple industries at companies like ESPN, Travelers, Otis Elevators, and United Technologies and led user experience as AVP/Head of Digital Design at The Hartford. Currently, Milton is the SVP & Executive Director of Experience Design at Bank of America responsible for the banks’ Wealth, Financial Wellness, Rewards/Deals, and Retirement digital experiences.
Rachel is an Executive Director of UX & Design at Vericast. Her passion is mentoring designers and building solid UX foundations with a research-based approach to fuel strategic growth. Over her long career as a UX & Design leader, she’s worked at companies large and small, producing award-winning designs, growing collaborative teams, empowering design innovation, and crafting user experiences for a variety of products, applications, and brand identities.
Amy West is the Head of US Digital Transformation & Innovation at Novo Nordisk. Her work in the direct response engagements gave her a great skill set for rapid testing and iterating based on what resonated with their customer segments and what failed. She launched the Novo-Nordisk Care Platform and the Army channel platform among other applications and brings a unique vision to the Healthcare innovation space. Her approach is that at one point in time we are all patients, are we served in a way that is relevant and appropriate for us? Good design is a fine intersection of tech, digital and data and if we can design healthcare experiences that give the decisions in patients hands, to be in control of the outcomes they desire which are aligned with the care providers, healthcare might become easier.
Vipin Maheshwary, User Experience Leader at Salesforce joins the show to share his journey of becoming a UX designer. What he loves about this work, the layers of details that go into translating a broad vision of a leader to user context with creative content and information architecture down to a simple button a user needs all the while keeping the business needs aligned. This is a skill that comes with looking through the lense of a user all the time.
Suma Kumaraswamy is an innovative & collaborative digital transformation leader with several patents, accolades to her credit. An industry leader who believes in creatively solving for customer needs while balancing business goals in a constantly changing landscape, Suma continues to champion and advocate for empathy led design thinking to deliver best in class experiences for customers as well as leveraging empathy for collaboration and transformation within the organization. Most recently as the Head of Mobile Product and User Research she was able to apply the customer-centric design principles to increase mobile banking app ratings from 2.2 out of 5 on the Apple App store to 4.8 out of 5 along with a significant increase in the NPS scores!
Ramesh Aki is the Vice President, Digital Solutions and Engineering at Ameriprise Financial Services. "I don't like that man, I must get to know him better." - Abraham Lincoln. This sums up Ramesh's philosophy of ideating, designing, launching and measuring solutions that become milestone events for an organization, like reimagining automation with available tools during the Y2K era. His team is his most valued customers and he is always thinking about how to create human and digital interactions that can create a positive impact. His team’s and his work at Elevance Health (previously Anthem, Inc.) earned them two Stevie Awards for innovations in sales and customer service, a NN|G award for best designed Intranet, and a US patent for System and Method of Assessing Sentiment of an Organization. He shares great insights about how to improve the health of an organization by investing in human relationships.
Julian Scutari, Global Senior Director, Finance Digital Transformation at Kimberly-Clark joins us to share how his passion for playing Rugby for 12 years taught him resilience and strategy in his work. He has been leading strategy and implementation of global transformations in the consumer goods space for more than a decade. He shares great tips and tricks about change enablement and future proofing your transformations to keep expanding the business value.
Raghav Singh has over twenty years of experience in product management leadership. He currently is a Director of Product Management at Salesforce and has previously worked at IBM, Oracle, and Inform. He has launched over 20 products and has twice won an award for the "Top New Product' at the HR Technology Conference. He is an author and frequently posts on talent and technology-related topics at ERE and TLNT.
A data, analytics, and technology executive with experience building products and partnerships with some of the top organizations across media, insurance, entertainment, government, telecom, nonprofit, automotive, political, and technology sectors on how to reshape their futures by leveraging data, insights, and technology. Peter is currently the Head of Strategy and Partnerships within the Innovation team at Allstate. Previously he worked at Google consulting Automotive clients on how to transform their digital operations. He also was one of the founding membersCivis Analytics in 2013, a company born out of the 2012 election campaign of President Obama focused on transforming how companies use person-level data to inform some of their hardest consumer problems. Prior to that, he held positions with Omnicom, Starcom, and National Geographic.
A data, analytics, and technology executive with experience building products and partnerships with some of the top organizations across media, insurance, entertainment, government, telecom, nonprofit, automotive, political, and technology sectors on how to reshape their futures by leveraging data, insights, and technology. Peter is currently the Head of Strategy and Partnerships within the Innovation team at Allstate. Previously he worked at Google consulting Automotive clients on how to transform their digital operations. He also was one of the founding membersCivis Analytics in 2013, a company born out of the 2012 election campaign of President Obama focused on transforming how companies use person-level data to inform some of their hardest consumer problems. Prior to that, he held positions with Omnicom, Starcom, and National Geographic.
Vishal Gupta is Senior Vice President, CIO and CTO for Lexmark International. He leads global information technology, software development, data science at Lexmark Ventures, and corporate strategy in a unified Connected Technology and Venturesteam. Prior to joining Lexmark, Gupta was global chief technology officer and SVP for Unisys Corporation, where he led a team of more than 1,500 engineers and drove innovation through emerging technologies including cloud and AI and played a pivotal role in its turnaround. he has also held executive leadership roles with Symantec Corporation and Cisco Systems.Vishal is a member of the Forbes Technology council, Wall Street Journal CIO council, and founding board member of WashingtonExec CTO council. He was recognized as Top100 CIO/CTOs by the National diversity council in 2021 and 2022.
Vishal Gupta is Senior Vice President, CIO and CTO for Lexmark International. He leads global information technology, software development, data science at Lexmark Ventures, and corporate strategy in a unified Connected Technology and Venturesteam. Prior to joining Lexmark, Gupta was global chief technology officer and SVP for Unisys Corporation, where he led a team of more than 1,500 engineers and drove innovation through emerging technologies including cloud and AI and played a pivotal role in its turnaround. he has also held executive leadership roles with Symantec Corporation and Cisco Systems.Vishal is a member of the Forbes Technology council, Wall Street Journal CIO council, and founding board member of WashingtonExec CTO council. He was recognized as Top100 CIO/CTOs by the National diversity council in 2021 and 2022.
Mauro Porcini is PepsiCo’s first-ever Chief Design Officer. He joined the food & beverage corporation in 2012 and in said role he is infusing design thinking into PepsiCo’s culture and is leading a new approach to innovation by design that impacts the company’s product platforms and brands, which include Pepsi, Lay’s, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Sodastream, Doritos, Lifewtr, bubly, Aquafina, Cheetos, Quaker, 7Up, Mirinda, amongst many others. Before joining PepsiCo, Mauro served as the first-ever Chief Design Officer at 3M. His mission was to build and nurture a design-sensitive culture in a technology-driven global corporation. His teams, based in the U.S, Italy, China and Japan, won many of the world’s most prestigious design and innovation awards.
Mauro Porcini is PepsiCo’s first-ever Chief Design Officer. He joined the food & beverage corporation in 2012 and in said role he is infusing design thinking into PepsiCo’s culture and is leading a new approach to innovation by design that impacts the company’s product platforms and brands, which include Pepsi, Lay’s, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Sodastream, Doritos, Lifewtr, bubly, Aquafina, Cheetos, Quaker, 7Up, Mirinda, amongst many others. Before joining PepsiCo, Mauro served as the first-ever Chief Design Officer at 3M. His mission was to build and nurture a design-sensitive culture in a technology-driven global corporation. His teams, based in the U.S, Italy, China and Japan, won many of the world’s most prestigious design and innovation awards.
Michael is a Product Design leader and entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in high tech working in various sectors including eCommerce, telecom, cloud software, information technology, health tech, and fintech. Following his passion for UI design, Michael became the Director of user experience at Kony.com [now Temenos] in 2010. Currently, Michael is the Head of Design for Core Products at Bill.com [NYSE - BILL] a publicly traded cloud-based software company responsible for the creation of business financial operations tools, and end-to-end payments automation. In addition to that, he is a product design advisor at a healthcare automation startup.
Michael is a Product Design leader and entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in high tech working in various sectors including eCommerce, telecom, cloud software, information technology, health tech, and fintech. Following his passion for UI design, Michael became the Director of user experience at Kony.com [now Temenos] in 2010. Currently, Michael is the Head of Design for Core Products at Bill.com [NYSE - BILL] a publicly traded cloud-based software company responsible for the creation of business financial operations tools, and end-to-end payments automation. In addition to that, he is a product design advisor at a healthcare automation startup.
Steve Tatham, Executive Creative Director at Universal Creative, Imagineer's one of the most prolific minds who also made to 2021 Blooloop Top 50 Theme Park Influencer joins us today to share his secret sauce of designing happiness over and over. Steve, lit up when he first went to a Disney Park at the age of 9 and followed through with his dream of being a Walt Disney, Imagineer. He has been a Theme park designer and influencer for almost three decades designing amazing emotional experiences for the users who keep coming back for more. He unpacks the key elements in creating these memorable immersive experiences and the creative thinking behind the facade. Listen till the end for a great liberating tip for the designer in you.
Steve Tatham, Executive Creative Director at Universal Creative, Imagineer's one of the most prolific minds who also made to 2021 Blooloop Top 50 Theme Park Influencer joins us today to share his secret sauce of designing happiness over and over. Steve, lit up when he first went to a Disney Park at the age of 9 and followed through with his dream of being a Walt Disney, Imagineer. He has been a Theme park designer and influencer for almost three decades designing amazing emotional experiences for the users who keep coming back for more. He unpacks the key elements in creating these memorable immersive experiences and the creative thinking behind the facade. Listen till the end for a great liberating tip for the designer in you.
Anusha Dwivedula is a technologist with an experience in leading global engineering and product teams. She is currently a director of product for the Enterprise data platform at Morningstar. In her current role, she manages a team of product managers responsible for the group's objective of finding and integrating meaningful investment insights by simplifying the investor journey with data discovery, packaging, and delivery. She played a pivotal role in Morningstar's journey of moving to AWS cloud by leading a team that built a centralized data platform that involves data lake, analytics platform, and data quality framework. She recently finished her MBA from the Chicago Booth school of business with a focus on strategy, entrepreneurship, and finance.
Anusha Dwivedula is a technologist with an experience in leading global engineering and product teams. She is currently a director of product for the Enterprise data platform at Morningstar. In her current role, she manages a team of product managers responsible for the group's objective of finding and integrating meaningful investment insights by simplifying the investor journey with data discovery, packaging, and delivery. She played a pivotal role in Morningstar's journey of moving to AWS cloud by leading a team that built a centralized data platform that involves data lake, analytics platform, and data quality framework. She recently finished her MBA from the Chicago Booth school of business with a focus on strategy, entrepreneurship, and finance.
Ramya Ramanathan is a Senior Vice President at Marsh McLennan, the world’s leading insurance broker and risk advisor, where she leads digital strategy and engineering for the firm’s commercial insurance platforms. Prior to joining Marsh, Ramya was most recently Senior Director of Product Development at American Express driving go-to-market product strategies for consumer and commercial campaigns. Ramya holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and a Masters's Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas. Ramya’s experience with different domains has given her a keen appreciation for managing change and how to use failures as stepping stones for the next opportunity. In this episode, she will talk to you about how to use pivots as a change agent and growth accelerator.
Ramya Ramanathan is a Senior Vice President at Marsh McLennan, the world’s leading insurance broker and risk advisor, where she leads digital strategy and engineering for the firm’s commercial insurance platforms. Prior to joining Marsh, Ramya was most recently Senior Director of Product Development at American Express driving go-to-market product strategies for consumer and commercial campaigns. Ramya holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and a Masters's Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas. Ramya’s experience with different domains has given her a keen appreciation for managing change and how to use failures as stepping stones for the next opportunity. In this episode, she will talk to you about how to use pivots as a change agent and growth accelerator.
Spyridon is a creative problem solver, innovator, and solutionist with experience consulting for financial institutions, lifestyle brands, and large enterprise-level organizations.
He was raised behind the counter of his family's diner, a local Chicago institution. Growing up and working in the restaurant business taught him the value of scrappy problem-solving and has given me insight into the inner workings of a business. It helped him to develop an understanding of the implications of decisions and their effect on the success of a business. For the last 5 years, he has been practicing UX. he has worked on various digital experiences for award-winning brands as well as a major financial service. He has a passion for XR experiences, fintech products, blockchain projects, and creative solutions that solve real problems for users. In his spare time, he enjoys martial arts, creating digital art, and playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Spyridon is a creative problem solver, innovator, and solutionist with experience consulting for financial institutions, lifestyle brands, and large enterprise-level organizations.
He was raised behind the counter of his family's diner, a local Chicago institution. Growing up and working in the restaurant business taught him the value of scrappy problem-solving and has given me insight into the inner workings of a business. It helped him to develop an understanding of the implications of decisions and their effect on the success of a business. For the last 5 years, he has been practicing UX. he has worked on various digital experiences for award-winning brands as well as a major financial service. He has a passion for XR experiences, fintech products, blockchain projects, and creative solutions that solve real problems for users. In his spare time, he enjoys martial arts, creating digital art, and playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Jack Nichols is the Vice President Of Product Management at Genesys. He shares his non-linear journey from networking to logistics to communications where he always paid attention to the customer's voice. He brought this interactive intelligence he gathered along his journey to informing product design experiments at Genesys. He is currently involved in global initiatives where his focus is to create valuable bundled products and services for his customers
Jack Nichols is the Vice President Of Product Management at Genesys. He shares his non-linear journey from networking to logistics to communications where he always paid attention to the customer's voice. He brought this interactive intelligence he gathered along his journey to informing product design experiments at Genesys. He is currently involved in global initiatives where his focus is to create valuable bundled products and services for his customers
Tamila Fathi is a Cybersecurity & Technology Executive and #15 in Top100 Women in Fintech Magazine - 2022 joins us to share examples of what was considered innovation 20 years back to where we are now. How to create solutions that work, the importance of defining dependencies early on, bringing the whole team in the same ring to perform their best. She is one transparent leader taking risks and re-defining the future of fintech.
Tamila Fathi is a Cybersecurity & Technology Executive and #15 in Top100 Women in Fintech Magazine - 2022 joins us to share examples of what was considered innovation 20 years back to where we are now. How to create solutions that work, the importance of defining dependencies early on, bringing the whole team in the same ring to perform their best. She is one transparent leader taking risks and re-defining the future of fintech.
Christian is a product leader and former founder who has spent his career in product roles at startups and scale-ups. He was the founder and CEO of UserMuse, a marketplace that helped B2B product teams get feedback from hard-to-find professionals in their target markets. He became Vice President of Product Management at UserTesting after the company acquired UserMuse in 2019. There he helped define the company's long-term vision and strategy for UserTesting's Human Insights SaaS platform and led the Product organization, including through the company's 2021 IPO. He has written for multiple outlets on product management and startup topics, including Fast Company, Mind the Product and Pragmatic Institute among others.
Christian is a product leader and former founder who has spent his career in product roles at startups and scale-ups. He was the founder and CEO of UserMuse, a marketplace that helped B2B product teams get feedback from hard-to-find professionals in their target markets. He became Vice President of Product Management at UserTesting after the company acquired UserMuse in 2019. There he helped define the company's long-term vision and strategy for UserTesting's Human Insights SaaS platform and led the Product organization, including through the company's 2021 IPO. He has written for multiple outlets on product management and startup topics, including Fast Company, Mind the Product and Pragmatic Institute among others.
Nishant Pandey is the Global Product Manager at JLL Technologies and manages a suite of technology products in the Commercial Real Estate space. Nishant leads cross-functional teams that are on a mission to make buildings smart, enhance ROI and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Prior to JLL, Nishant led large-scale digital transformation at TransUnion and Capgemini, where he played roles in product strategy, program management, and account management. An MBA graduate with majors in marketing and strategy from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management – Nishant lives in Chicago with his wife and two kids. When not working, Nishant loves to pursue his hobbies of songwriting and filmmaking.
Nishant Pandey is the Global Product Manager at JLL Technologies and manages a suite of technology products in the Commercial Real Estate space. Nishant leads cross-functional teams that are on a mission to make buildings smart, enhance ROI and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Prior to JLL, Nishant led large-scale digital transformation at TransUnion and Capgemini, where he played roles in product strategy, program management, and account management. An MBA graduate with majors in marketing and strategy from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management – Nishant lives in Chicago with his wife and two kids. When not working, Nishant loves to pursue his hobbies of songwriting and filmmaking.
Jonathan Barnett, Senior Director, Customer & User Experience at AmerisourceBergen, a leading global healthcare company, with a foundation in pharmaceutical distribution and solutions for manufacturers, pharmacies and providers, creating unparalleled access, efficiency and reliability for human and animal health. Jonathan finds himself fortunate to be serving the org at a pivotal point in their journey of bringing user and customer experience into the existing eCommerce practices. Jonathan has been focused in executing some of the Digital Transformation initiatives in a wide-spread organization. Looking at how to take these practices together to define the future of experience design with a global approach to address both the brand and employee experience aspect.
Jonathan Barnett, Senior Director, Customer & User Experience at AmerisourceBergen, a leading global healthcare company, with a foundation in pharmaceutical distribution and solutions for manufacturers, pharmacies and providers, creating unparalleled access, efficiency and reliability for human and animal health. Jonathan finds himself fortunate to be serving the org at a pivotal point in their journey of bringing user and customer experience into the existing eCommerce practices. Jonathan has been focused in executing some of the Digital Transformation initiatives in a wide-spread organization. Looking at how to take these practices together to define the future of experience design with a global approach to address both the brand and employee experience aspect.
Starting her career off in the fashion industry, Michelle Cohen had no idea that her career would be so varied. She has relished all of the opportunities that have taken her all the way from knitwear product management to food ingredients to finance. In all of her roles, her most important criteria is learning, curiosity and doing new things. This has translated into roles as diverse as product management to studying international affairs and to her current role as Innovation and Acceleration Lab Director at CME Group. In her spare time, she sees the world, gives architecture tours and TCM.
Starting her career off in the fashion industry, Michelle Cohen had no idea that her career would be so varied. She has relished all of the opportunities that have taken her all the way from knitwear product management to food ingredients to finance. In all of her roles, her most important criteria is learning, curiosity and doing new things. This has translated into roles as diverse as product management to studying international affairs and to her current role as Innovation and Acceleration Lab Director at CME Group. In her spare time, she sees the world, gives architecture tours and TCM.
Geetha Vidhyadhar, Director of Product Management at Accolades, a Personalized Healthcare company that puts humanity back in healthcare for employees by building relationships that connect them and their families to the right care at the right time. Geetha shares her journey coming from a family of doctors to now serving Healthcare employees powerfully. With a focus to eliminate burnout from the Healthcare workforce, she is on a path to Innovate using Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence to enable the Care Teams. Her work in providing best-in-class service through telephony and messaging channels is continuously evolving and improving to give the customers quick and meaningful service. She shares a lot of great tips for the product community and leaders to build a work environment where people want to do their best work every day.
Geetha Vidhyadhar, Director of Product Management at Accolades, a Personalized Healthcare company that puts humanity back in healthcare for employees by building relationships that connect them and their families to the right care at the right time. Geetha shares her journey coming from a family of doctors to now serving Healthcare employees powerfully. With a focus to eliminate burnout from the Healthcare workforce, she is on a path to Innovate using Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence to enable the Care Teams. Her work in providing best-in-class service through telephony and messaging channels is continuously evolving and improving to give the customers quick and meaningful service. She shares a lot of great tips for the product community and leaders to build a work environment where people want to do their best work every day.
Alan Hohn, Director, External Outreach and Software Strategy has been a leader at Lockheed Martin for the past 25 years delivering mission-critical software that serves pilots, sailors and department of defense. Testing incremental complex parameters like air quality, site reliability, other special hardware and software functions to analyze ahead of time what could fail requires continuous tests. In the span of 25 years he has seen and been part of the transformations from waterfall process to agile methodology improving performance systems with prototyping using virtualization and simulation solutions. He shares that designing an aircraft is once in a career opportunity and repeating a successful design of an aircraft has gone through a massive transformation at Lockheed.
Alan Hohn, Director, External Outreach and Software Strategy has been a leader at Lockheed Martin for the past 25 years delivering mission-critical software that serves pilots, sailors and department of defense. Testing incremental complex parameters like air quality, site reliability, other special hardware and software functions to analyze ahead of time what could fail requires continuous tests. In the span of 25 years he has seen and been part of the transformations from waterfall process to agile methodology improving performance systems with prototyping using virtualization and simulation solutions. He shares that designing an aircraft is once in a career opportunity and repeating a successful design of an aircraft has gone through a massive transformation at Lockheed.
Fumi is the Vice President, Experience Design from PNC joins us to share his unique journey that kicked off from a passion to solve human problems and the excitement of venturing into an unknown territory.
Fumi brought 75% efficiency to a new account opening process by cutting down on repeat information and tightening the customer experience at PNC. There are some great tips on management style that Fumi shares as well in this talk.
Fumi is the Vice President, Experience Design from PNC joins us to share his unique journey that kicked off from a passion to solve human problems and the excitement of venturing into an unknown territory.
Fumi brought 75% efficiency to a new account opening process by cutting down on repeat information and tightening the customer experience at PNC. There are some great tips on management style that Fumi shares as well in this talk.
Kendall leads the Rider & Maps UX Research team at Uber, where she and her team work to uncover insights about our users & identify strategies to deliver consistently great experiences for riders around the world. She spent several years working as an individual contributor before recently transitioning to a management role. Previously, she worked at SAP Concur, conducting research on enterprise business software for spend management. Prior to entering the UX Research field, Kendall worked in both design and product management before making the transition into UX Research. Kendall graduated with her BS in Human Centered Design & Engineering from the University of Washington in 2016. In this episode, Kendall shares how innovation is not making big changes but making little things easier.
Kendall leads the Rider & Maps UX Research team at Uber, where she and her team work to uncover insights about our users & identify strategies to deliver consistently great experiences for riders around the world. She spent several years working as an individual contributor before recently transitioning to a management role. Previously, she worked at SAP Concur, conducting research on enterprise business software for spend management. Prior to entering the UX Research field, Kendall worked in both design and product management before making the transition into UX Research. Kendall graduated with her BS in Human Centered Design & Engineering from the University of Washington in 2016. In this episode, Kendall shares how innovation is not making big changes but making little things easier.
Forward thinking Senior leader passionate about capturing business opportunities through digital solutions and delivering global complex projects to Fortune 500 companies. In two decades of experience earned the role of a trusted advisor by establishing credibility and proactive partnerships to align business and technology strategies. Leads with empathy, fostering Entrepreneurial micro culture for innovation -craft inspiring solutions, scale and launch products by navigating matrixed organizations.
Forward thinking Senior leader passionate about capturing business opportunities through digital solutions and delivering global complex projects to Fortune 500 companies. In two decades of experience earned the role of a trusted advisor by establishing credibility and proactive partnerships to align business and technology strategies. Leads with empathy, fostering Entrepreneurial micro culture for innovation -craft inspiring solutions, scale and launch products by navigating matrixed organizations.
Jesus is a technologist with decades of experience leading engineering and product teams for organizations that range from early-stage startups to large global corporations. In his current role at FIS, he leads the solutions strategy team that continues to fuel, with products and services, the behind-the-scenes operation of Private Equity firms across the globe. His passion and focus are to provide solutions to solve the problems that his customers face on a day-to-day basis in the fascinating journey of portfolio managers and investors seeking alpha.
Jesus is a technologist with decades of experience leading engineering and product teams for organizations that range from early-stage startups to large global corporations. In his current role at FIS, he leads the solutions strategy team that continues to fuel, with products and services, the behind-the-scenes operation of Private Equity firms across the globe. His passion and focus are to provide solutions to solve the problems that his customers face on a day-to-day basis in the fascinating journey of portfolio managers and investors seeking alpha.
Pavan Pidugu is a Chief Technology Officer at FMCSA delivering the world’s leading transportation system, serving the American people and economy through the safe, efficient, sustainable, and equitable movement of people and goods.
Pavan is shaping the technology modernization at FMCSA by bringing 20 years of experience. With a goal of contributing to creating safer world by taking out unsafe drivers and vehicles from our highways.
Let's take a closer look at delivering innovative technology solutions focused on safety missions through Pawan's lens.
Pavan Pidugu is a Chief Technology Officer at FMCSA delivering the world’s leading transportation system, serving the American people and economy through the safe, efficient, sustainable, and equitable movement of people and goods.
Pavan is shaping the technology modernization at FMCSA by bringing 20 years of experience. With a goal of contributing to creating safer world by taking out unsafe drivers and vehicles from our highways.
Let's take a closer look at delivering innovative technology solutions focused on safety missions through Pawan's lens.
Neha Pahwa is the Director of UX Design, currently working at ADP in New York City. She believes in designing clean and simple interfaces, which brings delight to her users. She is also serving as co-chair for HCI track at GHC 2022 and has received 14 design patents, issued and granted by US Patents and Trademark Office. She comes from India and has been settled in NY with her husband and 2 daughters.
Niklas Sundberg, Chief Information Officer for a Global Swedish Manufacturing company ASSA Abloy and a board member for the non-profit organization SustainableIT.org. In addition to his day job, Niklas is also the author of the upcoming book --“Sustainable IT: A Playbook for Technology Leaders”. In this episode, Niklas shares practical tips for CIO's and IT leaders to leverage more “sustainability by IT” approaches and proven ways to help drive their companies’ sustainability strategies forward. What can be done at a large-scale org level to the developer level to make an impact in the right direction?
Lan Tran is a learning strategist, experience designer, and technologist with over 20 years of experience in the learning and technology industries. She has been featured in Forbes and HR Tech Outlook for her people-first leadership style and learner-centric design focus to improve the employee experience through learning. Lan is currently the Director of Learning Design & Technology at McDonald’s, where she sets the vision and direction for a people-first learning design approach with a focus on behavior change and enabling technologies through continuous learning, gamification, and immersive experiences. Lan enjoys doing big things, making dreams and visions come true, and is known for making the impossible possible. Prior to joining McDonald’s, Lan was the Head of L&D Governance, Technology, and Operations at Kraft Heinz, where she set the vision and direction for L&D governance, learner engagement, learning analytics, and their learning ecosystem, including their online corporate university.
Sovdeep Das is a Sr. Director of Product at Fiserv, a global leader in payments and financial technology. Serving millions of clients globally in areas including account processing, digital banking; card issuing; payments; e-commerce; merchant acquiring; and more.
Sovdeep is leading transformational initiatives by bringing human emotional intelligence into the data intelligence and knowledge assets at Fiserv. Here is a peek at the world of a curious leader who is experimenting on what works best together to create the next generation of best in class experiences for their existing and future customers taking Fiserv to the next growth milestone.
Li Zeng is the Senior Product Designer at Carta, She is a Silicon Valley based designer and entrepreneur. She creates end-to-end digital experience. Currently, Li is a product design lead at Carta. Prior to Silicon Valley, Li taught design at the college level. She co-created a series of children’s books called Little Launchers, and hosted a podcast called Spark Creators to empower creators & entrepreneurs of all ages. Right now, she is working on a visual group card project called FunKudo.
Andy Vitale, Executive Vice President of Design at Rocket Companies, the nation's #1 mortgage lender, joins us in this episode. He leads a team focused on transforming the mortgage lending experience for millions of people who want to buy or refinance a home, along with professional partners across the lending and real estate spectrum. An international keynote speaker, Andy is known for authentic, inspiring talks on design leadership, design maturity and responsible design. In this episode Andy touches upon a lot of these concepts to illustrate how design can be a differentiator in creating meaningful experiences. There is a lot packed in this short episode you don't want to miss :)
Here is an insightful conversation with Greg Nudelman, Head of Design & Senior Director at Logic Monitor, who is committed to expanding what’s possible for businesses by advancing their technology by creating new ways for them to grow. Greg loves leading UX teams that create the "When can I buy this?" experience for their customers. In this episode, he shares some golden rules and fresh perspectives to leverage innovative AI/ML tools and what AI can bring to UX. Asking the right question and picking the right use case has a ton of bearing on Value creation for any business.
Joe Preston is currently Vice President of Design for Intuit. Joe leads teams by being hopelessly in love with design and gets energy through helping others through coaching and inspiration. Prior to Intuit, Joe co-founded a UX design agency, Momentum Design Lab, and worked with companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, AT&T, Mastercard and Verifone. In addition, as a design community leader, Joe organized and led the Enterprise UX meetup group for 6 years across 3 cities. Joe is a proud husband and father of twin daughters and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Carter Reue is Senior Director at Coupa, a cloud platform service provider for business spend management (BSM), empowering companies around the world with the visibility and control they need to spend smarter and safer. Carter shares great results-driven management leadership techniques focused on making an impact on the technical and operational aspects of large-scale projects. He shares how his Military career gave him an edge to execute and transform mission-critical project outcomes. Carter also shares some practical tips for career growth and finding the right fit for your skill.
Director in product development who loves to create products that help solve customers' pain points. In over 14 years of technology experience, I have taken different challenges in software development, from SDE, QA to Product Director, I have transitioned into a product leader role. I love taking challenges and finding satisfaction by creating simpler solutions for complex customer problems. In my current role at Amex, I am designing the Acquisition and onboarding experience for Personal Checking, Personal Savings and Personal Loans.
Jasmine Ahmed is the Global Head of Finance Transformation at News Corp, a global, media and information services company focused on creating and distributing content across a range of media channels. Jasmine is creating the first enterprise-wide global finance transformation function at News Corp to lead a cultural shift in transforming the finance function from a traditional scorekeeping approach to a data and tech-enabled decision-making approach while reducing cost to serve. She brings a lot of great insights about how she is approaching these shifts starting from the grassroots level, creating a value stream providing data-driven changes to deliver a great end-user experience.
Alvin Cho, Vice President of Engineering and Product, Digital Innovation & Transformation at Fiserv, a leading global technology provider serving the financial services industry powerfully. Alvin shares how he made some early but strong successes happen at Fiserv by launching a phenomenal developer studio product in 9 months. He started his project by creating meaningful connections first with the people in his team. Together they created a new language, set milestones, and provided exciting sneak peeks to the stakeholders with a servant leadership mindset keeping everyone informed before they ask for updates. Alvin, makes big projects happen by breaking things into simpler digestible steps for his team. This is a great example of how to keep work fun while achieving big goals.
Jeffrey Moore, is the Chief Product Security Officer at Staples who is focused on bringing the security at Staples up a notch by being a key partner and advocate to the business. He shares the importance of investing in the right team where every member feels part of the organization and brings their best to be most effective. Jeff talks about the benefits of bringing security by design to every product, Jeff also has a message for all of us to be nice to the people who handle security at your organization as these guys are under a lot of stress managing multiple networks, operating systems, business demands everyday and keeping the organization protected.
Sindre is a design leader at Ticketmaster. Having spent the last 12 years in various industries, Sindre has focused his career on using design as a problem-solving tool, building and enabling design teams, and consulting with SaaS businesses to support growth and scale with intuitively designed platforms. He currently enjoys working on B2B software for creating, managing, and reporting around live events."
A data, analytics and technology executive with experience building products and partnerships with some of the top organizations across media, insurance, entertainment, government, telecom, nonprofit, automotive, political and technology sectors on how to reshape their futures by leveraging data, insights, and technology. He is currently the Head of Strategy and Partnerships within the Innovation team at Allstate. Previously he worked at Google consulting Automotive clients on how to transform their digital operations. He also was one of the founding members Civis Analytics in 2013, a company born out of the 2012 election campaign of President Obama focused on transforming how companies use person-level data to inform some of their hardest consumer problems. Prior to that he held positions with Omnicom, Starcom and National Geographic.
We had an intriguing chat with Varun Sood, Director of Product - B2B Payments at American Express. His unique skill set is a combination of early learnings from the Pharma industry plus marketing strategy work that he now brings to his role as he leads the design practice for his function at AMEX. He took the risk to jump into a new domain and brought his appetite to learn with his transferable skills to solve challenges with a fresh perspective. How does a leading marquee brand popular with senior executives also appeal to the Millenials and the Gen-Zs? Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the thought leadership and execution of a successful brand.
When it comes to finding the right fit, we all have to go on a journey to reflect and identify what is it we really really want to feel successful professionally, personally and socially. Mel Reyes is a man who wears a lot of hats as Head of IT and Security, Chief Information Officer, CISO, CTO, Board Member and a Startup Advisor currently working at Getaround. A world’s leading connected carsharing platform, on a mission toward empowering people to carshare everywhere. Mel shares how he breaks down his mission to have a life and a job that aligns with his personal goals. He brings very inspiring stories from his career and personal life that he shares as a coach with his network to make a positive impact on people's life. I'm sure you are going to walk away from this episode dreaming of possibilities to realize.
Mitul Bhat, Director Of Product Design at VMware joins us for an intriguing talk about how he is showcasing the value of product design principles across a large engineering-heavy work culture. The constant battle of bringing user delight or enhancing operational efficiencies is real in his world. Mitul adds how critical it is to keep improving products using feedback data that informs the current and next generation of products. There are a lot of great design execution and leadership approaches that can be implemented in a large enterprise that is still new to product design in this insightful episode.
Pratik Dhebri, Vice President, Head of Product Management at AvalonBay Communities, which is an apartment living experience provider focused on developing, redeveloping, acquiring and managing high-quality apartment communities across the United States. Pratik was part of the Transformation journey as this group went digital with their community search, physical no-touch tour experience to automating application screening and leasing experience to ongoing service and maintenance of these multi-family communities. Pratik highlights the value of high human touch at critical points in an automated workflow to serve the client's needs effectively. If you are looking for ways to give more to your clients this is a great episode to dive in.
Kelsey Buhr, Manager of Design and Innovation at Marshfield Clinic Health System, brings her interesting journey from an administrative role to leading the Customer Experience Design and Innovation teams. Kelsey shares how she utilizes human-centered design methods to research, design, prototype, and guide the implementation of digital and physical service experiences and creates value for the people they serve.
Today we chatted with Andrew Lindsay and learned about his approach towards building out design teams and integrating them across organizations at different stages of growth. Andrew has recently joined KraftHeinz as their Head of Design and User Experience on the Digital Revolution team. He has recently served as the Vice President, Head of Design and User Experience at HomeX, a Chicago-based start-up focused on radically improving the home services industry. While there he was responsible for building out a cross-disciplinary design practice of visual designers and UX professionals, catering to both B2B and B2C software, services, and application design and development. Prior to joining HomeX, Andrew was the Head of Design at Syniverse, "The World's Most Connected Company", where he was responsible for overseeing their flagship digital transformation program focused on delivering a significantly improved customer experience, in partnership with some of the world's most recognized telecom companies. Earlier, he was focused on bringing disruptive, data-driven user-level personalization software and solutions to the ad-tech space as the Vice President of Creative, at Conversant. In this role, he had the opportunity to build out and oversee practice areas across a number of disciplines: User Experience, Creative Technology, Digital Production, Creative Operations, and Front-end Engineering.
A native of Chicago, Andrew received his MA from the Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK and his BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver, CA. His free time is spent in the suburbs of Chicago either with his wife and children or tackling DIY projects on his 1929 bungalow, one nail at a time.
Mark Fallai is a Senior Director at Exact Sciences where he leads the Experience Design Team. Best known for creating the Colorectal Cancer Detection Test, Cologuard, Exact Sciences’ mission is to conquer cancer through early detection and guiding patients to more effective treatments. His team partners with leaders across the company to bring impactful user experiences in the digital and physical space.
Christopher Brereton, Partner & Vice President of Product at Sidebench, a design and development studio based in LA focused on Climate-Tech & Health-Tech, joins us as one of our favorite repeat guests. He has an interesting perspective on viewing a company as a product incorporating teachable, repeatable and scalable frameworks within the business as features to optimize the supply and demand sides of the spectrum. He shares about continuously mapping the customer journey with the business process and operations to identify areas of improvement. Chris sprinkles great shares on fresh new perspectives on a bunch of different aspects of running a successful product - your business.
Jason Ferrell, MVP, Head of Design for Card & Bank, Capital One joins us to share about what got him interested in creating memorable consumer experiences. He approaches design as an opportunity to create an emotional connection which then leads to a memorable experience. Jason points out how money is very emotional for people but traditionally banking applications are very transactional. This episode gives a glimpse of how human-centric design blends these two perspectives in a large complex financial ecosystem.
Jenna Date is the Chief Experience Officer for Hospital and Health Systems at Altera (formerly known as Allscripts). Jenna's life mission is to Lead Design for a Compassionate World. In this episode, she unpacks how she uses design as a catalyst for connecting and creating experiences that engage and impact. She leads with a strong passion to serve by creating meaningful and exceptional products and services that are only possible to come alive when there is a strategic and sustainable vision embedded early into the process. Jenna believes that every organization needs to have a CXO who can bring human centricity to the system thinking approach. Her beautiful empathy for the persons she serves comes across through this conversation.
Brant Cooper, is the CEO and Founder at Moves the Needle, an agency that ignites entrepreneurial action within large organizations by educating, enabling and empowering employees to be closer to the customer, move faster and act bolder. Brant shares some amazing stories about how orgs are still not investing in the human side of digital transformation. He points out where the business knowledge lives in today's digital world and how leaders need to tap into these massive opportunities sitting in plain sight. He shares some practical tips for leaders to think with a startup mindset as they think about value creation.
Vishal Kapoor is the Head of Product, Data & Innovation at Prospection, a Pioneer in healthcare data analytics. His team brings insights that help pharmaceutical companies and healthcare professionals drive better healthcare outcomes for patients, using predictive analytics and machine learning. Vishal shares his exciting journey of launching an award winning product called - Patient Finder which informs healthcare professionals ahead of time about any indications for a possibility of a rare disease. Vishal is a huge practitioner of bringing the data teams and design teams one step closer to each other to create extraordinary results.
Mike Colarossi, Vice President, Product Line Management, Innovation and Sustainability at Avery Dennison joins the Fail Faster show to share his belief that "Anything is Possible" if you put the right energy, curiosity, and conviction into the mix. He gives us a glimpse of an exciting future for the apparel industry, where digital triggers tell a garment’s story. A QR code on a care label, linked to an app, can reveal details such as which farms the cotton came from, how it was weaved and stitched, and transported to the consumer. Digitizing vital information about recycling the garment can help consumers contribute to a circular economy too. This episode is a peek at early ideations that lead to huge disruptions.
Veena Dandapani SVP, Global Head Product Strategy & Management at Western Union joins us to share her journey of falling in love with amazing possibilities Technology can unleash at an early age. Today Veena uses tech to lead with a clear goal of serving her customers who deserve better experiences as they transact on the go anywhere on the planet. She brings design, tech, legal, marketing, and business teams in alignment to drive true transformations everyday at Western Union. There are a lot of complexities she unpacks in this episode, let's jump in.
Stephen Miranda is the Director of Design at Red Ventures, a world-class intelligence/analytics company making it easier for people to find information and relevant products and services for their health, travel, finances, homes, education, and entertainment. Stephen shares how his love for making personalized gifts from his early days as an artist still guides his approach as he designs software products. He sees the early user interactions as unwrapping a gift to see how users are receiving the creation. Stephen shares his perspective about how we all have limited time to make an impact in our roles as people change and leadership shifts and what priorities we thought were important shifts too. Are we doing our best to maximize our impact?
Rob Swymer is the business and life strategist and a leader at Splunk, powering the enterprise to help tens of thousands of organizations turn data into doing so they can unlock innovation, enhance visibility into their data and drive resilience. Rob shares about driving excellence as a leader by bringing empathy, care, and love to the enterprise's work culture. He talks about how he has earned business year after year by retaining customers and delivering continued value. We are thrilled about his new book launch with great tips on conquering adversity in business and life.
Albert Wang, Director of Product Design at Bloomreach, a Commerce experience provider empowering brands to deliver hyper personalized customer experiences. Albert shares how he thinks about Design as a way to serve society. He has some great methodologies to measure design success especially when you are the only designer in your organization. Solving a problem from a system revamp perspective rather than a single product solution view might be a complete gamechanger.
Ryan Frederick, Principal AWH shares about his newest product creations that enable multi-sensory experiences using metaverse for work environments. His work is super fascinating as it unpacks why we might be feeling Zoom fatigue and how we might be able to shake things up to experience more immersive and engaging virtual working environments. This episode uncovers unique ways of strengthening and improving the quality of our work relationships that we are slowly losing in our transition to remote work.
Alex Weingart returns to our show to build on his last topic "How to PM Your Life", this time focusing on treating your career as a product, and managing it accordingly. Alex (who has served as Director of Product & Design for TV Guide, Metacritic, GameSpot, as a product lead at CBS and Microsoft, and will soon be joining Shopify as a product leader for their consumer app Shop) draws on his experience as both employee and hiring manager to share key product frameworks you can apply to career planning and job transitions. He discusses everything from identifying goals for each stage of your career to evaluating your current job and other prospective jobs in light of your goals. And, if your current job falls short, Alex shares key tactics to conduct a successful job search, from top-of-funnel cold emails, to interview prep tips, to compensation negotiation. If your work life has felt stuck (regardless of your stage in your career), this is the episode for you.
Neil Milliken, VP - Global Head of Accessibility at Atos. Atos is a global leader in digital transformation. Neil shares what accessibility in design really means. What are the key things to be thinking about as responsible designers who bring products to life, how can these products reduce unintended consequences on the environment or individuals? Neil shares how organizations need to be thinking about decarbonization as they design products. Neil unpacks using sustainable practices as we create UI designs that are inclusive to writing accessible code that leads to successful interactions.
Troy Azmoon, Vice President, Platform and Product Design at ServiceNow joins me to share his intriguing journey through Engineering, Product, and Design. You will enjoy his analogies of how he brings creative thinking into hard core engineering work. He brings another intriguing concept as a leader that in order to be successful, we need to learn to say NO to our ego, our preferences in service of the bigger Mission.
Adam Kesner, Senior Director of Product Management - Common Retail Services at Cox Automotive, joins us to share his approach and techniques he loves as he moves from a solution based into a more enterprise-focused design environment. What makes a product launch successful, how to approach data security as designers, there is a lot packed in this short episode.
Sal Bolaños is the Director of UX & Design at TransUnion. He shares some of his epic failures as a new Design practitioner who is trying to shake traditional ways of working. He shares his journey of taking calculated risks and moving the needle to make trust possible within the internal teams and with the customers, so businesses and consumers can transact with confidence and achieve great things together.
Eduardo D'Oracio de Almeida, is the Director of Engineering Innovation at BrandSafway joins us to share his amazing journey of embracing problems as opportunities to create unique solutions. In the world of critical construction deadlines with around 8000 ongoing jobs at one time and a large team of 30-40,000 construction crew to manage Eduardo follows a principle of taking no shortcuts and keeping the safety of his crew at the forefront. He says when he wakes up every morning, he can't wait to go to work and serve in a way that matters.
Mohit Goenka is the Director of Engineering at Yahoo. Mohit leads the Yahoo Mail Android app team, he shares the golden rules of managing a global team. Driving a simple and effective team-building culture to keep everyone involved is important to him as a leader. His shares about the recent in-app enhancements his team has launched for Yahoo mail, those are perfect examples of thinking about the user first. Finding small and big opportunities to improve an experience might be a gamechanger for the end-users than giving them new features they might not use. Wouldn't your users stay with you if the UX tells them that you are continuously iterating products thinking about their ease?
Rene Insam is the Vice President, Corporate & Institutional Solutions, Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley. He brings a thought-provoking perspective on delineating the ongoing digital transformation vs intense business transformations. Maybe it's time for organizations to look into creating space for a transformation backlog to bring about deep-rooted cultural breakthroughs in addition to our ongoing work. Rene has some great thoughts on how companies could expand their brand capacity using an experimentative approach to enrich their client relationships.
Amit Shivale, Director, Head of Product Strategy & Growth at Avant shares the importance of being mindful and looking at what really matters in life and at work. What cost we assign to what value is a choice we make everyday in every role. Translating these concepts into product design is fascinating, Looking at products as a friction point between customers and the task they want to accomplish changes the perspective of how we look at products, these points of friction now become new opportunities for experiments. This new role makes designers the new product partners of the customers leading them into a future of connectedness. Do check out the recently launched premium Avant Cash back Rewards Card that Amit is celebrating.
Claire Kwon is the Senior Director of Product Design at BlackLine, a software development company enabling companies modernize accounting operations with intelligent automation. Claire shares her unusual path into the product design world as she navigated the world of art as an art critic to a museum curator who wanted to bring these unique experiences with all their details into software design. She takes pride in bringing her learnings to the new generation of designers as she educates them.
Beth Seaman, Vice President, Product Experience at Entertainment Partners joins us to give us a glimpse of her exciting day at work as she leads high performing teams managing multiple complex enterprise projects. Her learnings from her foundational years as a designer at Disney fuels some of the process frameworks today at EP. What's the mindset of a leader dealing with ambiguity in a highly accountable role? Let's find out!
Jonathan Witenko, System Director of Virtual Health and Telemedicine at Lee Health engages with us to share his hugely inspiring career and life story. How he became passionate about bringing tech to empower Healthcare professionals to truly serve people in need, meet them where they are be it at Church or a Barber shop. Jon's passion to serve impactfully is impressive, he is working on some great projects to bring digital health equality and making healthcare simple, usable and practical. Jon is looking for the right partners to collaborate with.
Adam Thomas, Lead Product Manager at SmartRecruiters joins us to share the three key questions Product designers need to ask the stakeholders to keep the work going in the direction of success. Almost 60-90% of ideas are bad ideas when it comes to delivering real value. This episode talks about a mindset that embraces the freedom to change your mind and pivot before it's too late.
Brad Jaehn, Vice President: Product Strategy & Operations at Arrivia, a travel organization with a mission to help people around the world travel better and experience more. Brad shares what is important to today's traveler and how leaders have to find opportunities to continuously innovate to meet short-term goals while pursuing long-term strategic objectives in constantly evolving world.
Brent Kedzierski is the Chief Learning Officer at HumanWRKS providing Industry 5.0 solutions and strategies based on learning science and human-centric design principles for today’s connected worker. Brent shares what works and what doesn't work as we shift from mass production to mass personalized environments. Our direct leaders make more of an impact on our general well-being than our healthcare providers. Brent shares what people really want from a job based on research data.
Lata Ahuja is the Senior Director of Engineering at CarGurus, engineering a better car-shopping experience using technology and data analytics. Lata shares her experience in delivering products in the start up space and the important lessons she learnt from working at startups. She shares tips and tricks about scaling technology teams efficiently through hyper-growth curves. Disclaimer: While Lata works as CarGurus, the views expressed on this podcast are her own.
Sandy Carter SVP and Channel Chief at Unstoppable Domains, Sandy's mission is to onboard the world onto the decentralized web by building blockchain-based identity platforms. Sandy gives a glimpse into this new digital world where we walk and control our digital identities as we like. This digital world of decentralized web allows users to step into the metaverse. Are you ready to learn, dialogue and play and step into the world of Web 3?
Tosin Aje-Adegbite is the senior director of product management at EAB. EAB is an education management organization with a mission to empower educational institutes across the nation. Tosin shares how she continues to make huge impacts in empowering educational institutions with continuous attention to delivering relevant content in ways that are engaging. This episode touches upon limitless possibilities for students, teachers and institutions as they begin to leverage the beauty and scale the digital world offers when it comes to receiving and imparting learning.
Neetika Bansal is the Head of Engineering, Money Movement at Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Neetika shares what it takes to keep the talent engaged and hire the right new talent in this hot market. Her stories of how her engineering team at Stripe emerged as a winner as the eCommerce market went through a decade of growth in a span of a few months, are not to be missed.
Milan Kocic is the Head of Sixth Sense - an open innovation platform at Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence. A global leader in digital reality solutions, combining sensor, software and autonomous technologies to make factories smarter. Milan brings his wisdom from finding himself in new roles that he crafts in organizations around product, service and innovation design. He draws an interesting parallel in the Fintech and Manufacturing industry to arrive at an innovative speed-dating platform to make startups successful. This conversation packs a lot of interesting nuggets to guide leaders to aim for the right balance between making an impact on the bottom line and continuing their ability to dream for the next big innovative leap.
Darren Thayre, is the Head of Innovation focused on global strategic initiatives at Google building long-term Digital Transformation Partnerships across globe with a common goal of jointly transforming industries. Darren shares the recent trends, practices and his opinion on the critical underpinnings of a great customer experience. You get a glimpse of how an innovator thinks about elegantly transitioning from old and making space for the new. There is a lot of wisdom packed in this short episode, do not miss the exciting wrap-up of this episode.
Shivani Aneja, Sr Director Exp Design & Content Strategy at EPAM, a global digital transformation services provider – leading the industry in digital and physical product development and digital platform engineering services. Shivani shares how she quickly understood what was not working for her as an Architect and changed course to get into editorial design leading into digital content design. Today she leads two business practices and a team of 50 plus, managing a huge growth spurt of 250% from the last two years. Shivani is looking forward to the new year as she plans to lead with more authenticity and higher collaboration.
Cory Warfield is the Chief Connection Officer at Cory Connects - the forward thinking tech-forward organization helping many thousands worldwide upskill. Cory comes back to talk to us again after almost two years during which his idea not only took shape but expanded in different ways. Cory shares how to best leverage social media to network & get ahead as a startup, how to make investors chase you and get funding without making it the big focus. It's a short but crisp episode with a lot of practical startup advice packed.
Samantha Berg, Head Of Design at Chime, one of the fastest-growing financial technology companies in the U.S., offering banking services that are helpful, easy, and free. Samatha shares some of her amazing stories of how her passion of making things for people led her through a path of designing homes to mobile phone keyboards to AR/VR to wearable devices to now Fintech. Sam loves tapping into opportunities to delight people with thoughtful design, she takes cues from daily human interactions to create experiences that are memorable.
Ruizhi Liu, Sr. Lead Experience Designer at Travelers insurance joins us to share his journey from an industrial product designer to an Experience Design leader. Ruizhi shares his successes with semantic profiling workshops and how those lead to a visual direction a product takes. His passion for design operations using experimentation and collaboratively iterating is percolating in the org. Ruizhi is hiring talented professionals to make his team strongly move to a culture of cohesive design and development.
Abraham Doris-Down, Senior Director of UX and Visual Design at Boston Globe Media Partners. BGMP is New England's largest news gathering organization, committed to being an indispensable, trusted, reliable source of round-the-clock information. Abraham shares how he found a perfect match for his skills going through a winding path from recruiting to Sales to then finding a great master's program at GA Tech called Human-Computer Interaction, which propelled his career as a UX designer and leader. He talks about how he brought learnings from his sales career where he was not comfortable with interrupting people's life to now making sure he provides highly valuable content in the few minutes of uninterrupted attention he gets from today's busy customers.
Auldyn Matthews is the Associate Director of UX at Phreesia. Phreesia is a platform service provider across Administrative, financial and clinical operations to revolutionize point of service for medical groups of all sizes so they can provide exceptional patient care. Auldyn failed into Design as she always wanted to take the data research she was conducting to the next level. She has some great tips and insights for junior designers to think about as they navigate the design world. Auldyn is super excited about all that is coming up for Phreesia in the coming year and is looking to find good talent as they get ready to launch new and enhanced healthcare products.
Dr. Arun Gulani is the Founding Director and Chief Surgeon at Gulani Vision Institute, a state-of-the-art eye care facility. This episode feels like a movie unfolding as Dr. Gulani walks us through his dream of becoming a doctor when he was a kid, to how he executed that dream step by step putting hard work in, taking a different route than normal. Fueled strongly by his passion to serve and standing his ground during tough times. His approach to life is evident in the way he works with each of his patients and runs his business. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, the Internationally famous Gulani Vision Institute receives patients and eye surgeons from around the Globe seeking Advanced eye surgery and cutting-edge innovative technology. Why settle for anything less than 20/20 vision?
Shay Isdale is the Director Of User Experience at Athenahealth, a team innovating healthcare, optimizing financial performance and delivering high-quality care. Shay shares great tips about carefully introducing newer frameworks into an older machine to bring it up to speed with the rest of the industry. Why be stuck in a sub-optimal level of experience when there is a way to achieve an amazing turnaround?
Chien Kui is the Senior Director of Engineering at Oscar Health. An organization committed to utilizing technology, design and data to humanize health care .
Chein shares how having freedom of choice when he was a kid led him to step by step choose a path leading to serving the community with value-based care that is affordable and easy to avail for members.
Tim Leake is the senior VP and Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer at RPA, a modern ad agency with a People First perspective. Tim truely embraces the people first mindset as he thinks about continuously serving his customers year after year and staying relevant. He brings innovation in his creative digital expression to empower marketing and business development at RPA. This is a super insightful and fun episode, don't miss the exciting end where Tim talks about making work fun especially now that we are going into a hybrid work environment.
Tim Ringel is the Global CEO at Meet the People, a next-generation advertising company focused on transparency, talent and integration. Tim combines his passion for putting people first and learnings from being an investor to creating a unique model at Meet The People is to create synergies between the agencies with a unitary incentive structure, where creating value for your agency creates value at the top. Tim highlights the importance of finding the right cultural fit first over capabilities and then enabling them to work from everywhere, be hired anywhere, and be flexible to do what they like.
John Ore Chief Product Officer at Insider, the global digital media organization behind Insider, Business Insider, Markets Insider, and Insider Intelligence. Insider Inc. publications reach 93M unique U.S. visitors a month, generate 2.1 billion video views a month, and have over 234M followers across social media. John heads a high-performing team that works to earn their consumer's attention and loyalty every single day by bringing them content they can trust, enjoy and rely upon. John shares some tools and techniques that work for him in this highly accountable role in the service of earning more customer loyalty.
Teresa Wu is the Vice President of Innovation and Client Engagement at IDEMIA, a global leader in digital identity solutions, and a trusted partner in the public and private sectors for more than 60 years. Teresa is a passionate leader who prioritizes service of country and community. Her job at IDEMIA brings her passion and priorities to life enabling her to make important decisions that inform safety for the greater good and use her problem-solving skills and creativity to continuously grow as a transformational leader.
Josh Rosenzweig is Senior Director of Digital Transformation and User Experience at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, a Global legal firm committed to innovation and exceptional client service with the collaboration of more than 2,200 lawyers and specialists who provide elite legal services across industry sectors for multinational corporations to startups around the world. Josh shares his passion to create new things since he was a young boy, he is bringing design first focus in Lawtech as he leads the Digital transformation at Morgan Lewis with a focus on building products that align with the culture of the company.
Andrew Clark is the Head of Design for Client Experience at H&R Block, delivering new, engaging client experiences. His team is focused on tapping, testing, writing remarkable experiences that deliver expertise and individual care to their customers. Andrew shares what Block behaviors he finds fascinating, he is driven to continue to know his customers better to be able to serve them better so they are prepared and confident about their financial health throughout the year. Right now he is focused on how to stitch a Tax experience throughout the year rather than a one-time mundane event.
Kayvan Sotoodeh is the VP of User Experience & Design at Tillster, a global leader in powering online ordering and delivery solutions for restaurant brands. He talks about being open to trying your hand at new opportunities to learn. Kayvan brings his love for food and technology together at Tillster as he serves his clients by making their experience of ordering food easy, fun and engaging.
Leo Frishberg is the Director of User Experience at Athenahealth, an electronic medical records company driving innovation in healthcare. Athena’s products and services help its customers (medical providers of all sizes and stripes) optimize financial performance while delivering high-quality care to their patients.
Leo was born-digital to a dad, a progressive technologist, who fueled Leo's early interest in computing and customer-centric design. With a passion for (and license to practice) Architecture and degrees in Environmental Planning and Information Science, Leo keeps Design Sustainability at the forefront of his work. He not only believes in failing fast and cheap, he promotes designing for failures as the best way to learn what users truly need. There are some really insightful stories from the trenches of innovation packed in this episode that you don't want to miss.
Seth Roberts is the Design Director, Member, and the Personalization Platform at USAA, a provider for insurance, banking, financial products, and advice to the nation's military community. Seth goes back to how he landed his first job as a web designer to being a servant leader today supporting ideas, talent, and growth as he leads multiple projects. He believes in keeping a divergent thinking mindset as a team to land better solutions when designing products and platforms.
Matt Fangman, Senior Director, Design Thinking & Education at Genesys, a global contact center servicing company orchestrating over 70 billion amazing experiences in more than 100 countries – through Cloud, Digital and AI technology. Matt is a Design Thinking practitioner who believes in transforming from the inside. His transformational approach makes teams have the power to deliver proactive, predictive, and hyper-personalized experiences to deepen their customer connections by enabling true intimacy at scale. Matt says "Design Thinking is for Everyone" as we navigate from an economy of agriculture to industrial to service to now experience, we need another look at our techniques and re-evaluate our focus on human-centricity as creators.
Wayne Haber, is the Director of Engineering at GitLab. Gitlab is a complete DevOps platform, to help teams improve development cycle time from weeks to minutes. Wayne is also a veteran of three successful startups (including GitLab) and has experience in multiple areas including healthcare, finance, and security. Wayne talks about how bringing transparency and constantly iterating leads to growth and fulfillment. He is excited about applying ML to improve user experience and loves the environment of continuous collaboration at Gitlab.
Dave Hoffer, ex-McKinsey AP and exPWC MD, joins me to share his Design wisdom on his new book on Design Transformation. He talks about the interesting relationship between Design and long-term thinking and how it plays into our social layers of culture, infrastructure, policies, etc. He talks about the importance of slowing down and for companies to pay more attention to details as they scale and not fall into the trap of "moving fast and breaking things." This episode is a must-listen for company and Design leaders.
Mathew McCarthy joins me from G4S, a leading global, integrated security company. His passion for people, process and technology comes through in this conversation. He shares how during Covid his team was tasked with designing tools and processes for making going back to work safe for various organizations. Matt shares his approach to developing and implementing product management pipelines and processes.
Sandy Carter is the Vice President, Amazon Web Services. The ever-changing flavors of the tech industry keeps her excited about creative ways of solving the next big customer challenge. Be it using 3D printing for kidney replacement to save a life or predicting the next maintenance needed by an aircraft or having access to the school calendar to integrate family and work lives better. Sandy loves to serve AWS customers and partners by empowering them to create their future with leading-edge technologies designed with purpose.
Amit Bhargava is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Infineon Technologies, a legacy global semiconductor manufacturing enterprise who believes in increasing the performance of modern technology with passion and precision for the present and future. Amit shares his passion for going beyond the job towards the bigger purpose. His learnings from his journey across the globe, the exposure to the cultural nuances of each country brings out the common language of building relationships. Let's dive in and get excited about what the future holds.
Ethan Danstrom is the VP of User Experience at Signify Health, a leading healthcare platform that leverages technology to create value-based payment programs transforming how care is paid for and delivered at home. Ethan brings a fresh perspective to User Experience by focusing on how to bring more ease to any task be it physical or digital. He believes in starting with understanding the pieces of the process which always fit into a solution like pieces of a puzzle fit together. This episode is packed with tons of practical tools spanning from strategy to handling anxiety at work to adopting UX as a way of thinking in our lives.
Tosin Aje-Adegbite is the senior director of product management at EAB. EAB is an education management organization with the mission to make education smarter by providing more than 2000 institutions across the nation with the strategic guidance and data they need to prepare for tomorrow’s students. Tosin shares a ton of tools in this episode from her servant leadership approach like thinking laterally too about career moves to acquire new skills vs always taking the vertical approach. Making content easily accessible and inclusive to a broad range of students.
Sal Bolaños, Design Director at TransUnion, which is a global information and insights company that makes trust possible between businesses and consumers, by ensuring that each consumer is reliably and safely represented in the marketplace. Sal shares his organic journey fed by curiosity and hunger to keep learning and improving. In his role as a design leader he involves business leaders early in the design process which makes the immediate and long term value more real for all the stakeholders.
Mark Zais is the Chief Data Scientist at US Special Operations Command. He is an experienced Army officer with a history of military leadership roles working with government, academia, and private industry. He is bringing his skills in data science and machine learning to leading a large organization towards becoming more data-driven.
Lauren Zack is the VP of Product Design at Doma, formerly known as States Title. Under Lauren's leadership, this group is aggressively working on making title and escrow a simpler, seamless process for lenders, agents and homebuyers across the country. Lauren is a highly accomplished and passionate design leader who is very excited about bringing the new transformative technologies to disrupt the real estate industry so people like you and me can easily buy homes sitting on our couch. If you want to get inspired and know more about designing minimum lovable products, this episode is a must-listen:)
Adam Kesner, Senior Director of Product Management joins me from COX Automotive, a global company with more than 27,000 team members and a family of brands that make buying, selling, owning and using vehicles easier for everyone. He shares how his curiosity behind the "why" for whatever he did led him to a path of Product management to his role now where he is continuously working to improve the experience of the various users in the automotive industry. Stitching a user experience from auto agents to technicians in the service to parts inventory management to financial tools to empower auto dealerships to be able to serve their customers better
Nathan Felt is an Experience and Product Design Leader at Wells Fargo. He blends his passion for Psychology, Technology and Storytelling in his work as he creates rich digital experiences to serve user needs. He shares his learnings of what to be aware of as a designer when designing for a global market.
Alexander Weingart is the Director of Product & Design at Red Ventures, the #1 digital media company in the US. Red Ventures has a stable of well-known brands like CNET, Lonely Planet, Bankrate, and Healthline, and Alex is specifically responsible for all the Gaming & Entertainment brands, a portfolio that includes TV Guide, Metacritic, GameSpot, GameFAQs, and more. Alex shares some of his key stories across his career in consumer media at companies of all sizes, both as an individual contributor, as a manager, and the transition between the two. Beneath his stories lay valuable lessons: speaking up, focusing on engagement before growth, the criticality of power users, the 3 areas to excel into transition to management, a framework to manage people, and staying focused on what you can control. He ties it all together by applying the learnings of product management to your personal life: creating a personal roadmap, creating & breaking habits, and regularly reflecting on failures & successes. Also, Alex is hiring PMs & Designers (example: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2691321796/). Please reach out to him directly on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajweingart/) to find out more.
Rich Poulsen is the Director of User Experience (UX) at Lendio who is creating a new reality for small business owners by providing easy access to capital through their proprietary tech marketplace of 75+ lenders. Rich shares how his background as an Architect is helping him practice empathy as he leads a large design team and fosters a culture of empowering small businesses to be more competitive. His passion is to fuel the American dream by crafting the right borrower match to the right financial product and the provider. This is an insightful episode.
Graham Sadtler joins me from Bosch where he heads Product Development and Innovation teams for over 11 years, with a focus on usability, brand design, meaningful innovation, and design for Home appliance manufacturing. Here's an inside look at a winning skill combo behind well-designed appliances that Graham brings. A peek at a very near future of embedded software and cameras with object recognition to tell you if you are out of milk, while you are at the grocery store. Suggestions on what dinner can be fixed with what's in your refrigerator, who wouldn't like that after a busy day at work?
Koji Pereira is the Senior Manager of Product Design at Twitter, and was formerly Head of Design for Lyft Business. In our conversation, he discusses how pursuing creativity and ambitious ideas led to a number of fast failures, a few huge wins, and a successful and fulfilling career at organizations like Google, Lyft, and Twitter. He’s passionate about supporting diversity and inclusion in the design community, which he expresses as a design mentor and through his Instagram Live show, Cells and Pixels.
Abhay Kataria is the Senior Director of Engineering at Seagate Technologies which is a precision-engineered data storage company based in Fremont, CA.
Abhay brings some very meaningful insights from leading the org for the last 22 years and how he is fostering the culture of evolving by failing faster, iterating and growing. He believes in giving space to his teams to try something different to find freedom in structured frameworks.
Devesh Dahale currently works as the Director of Health Systems Engineering at Southeast Health, a 420-bed regional facility. This team, through innovation and sustained performance, has achieved the reputation of providing excellent diagnostic, clinical, surgical and patient care services available in the region. Devesh’s previous improvement work in healthcare was at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and through two collaboratives consisting of multiple pediatric hospitals.
Devesh's journey is very intriguing from his early days of automotive component engineering and solving physical component issues like wiring defects to now providing meaningful inferences to add efficiencies to processes and improvements in performance within Healthcare facilities. His work in effectively capturing bedside patient data and understanding at a larger scale the general well-being of a patient population and even community is very impressive. His passion for continuous improvement of patient outcomes and experience is super inspiring.
David DesRoches joins me from Oliver Wyman, where he heads the Engineering team. Oliver Wyman Digital is a premier technical delivery and advisory strategy consulting firm. David combines his musical interest in a unique way to make tech interesting. He brings the structure in music to code and adds layers of creativity on top of that structure. From Spotify to making an impact with a powerful visual tool called Pandemic Navigator, David has tons of creative ideas that he is working on launching next. Oh wait, did we actually make him sing one of his Parodies?
Selene De La Cruz is the Director of Content Design & Strategy at Mastercard which is a global technology company in the payments industry. Her desk and office space are full of alphabets and words with which she stitches wonderful stories sometimes in diverse languages to shape the product experience from within a product. Her journey to get to this beautiful place in her career and being able to serve in a powerful way is like an interesting story unfolding. I'm sure there are some answers in here for you to listen to.
Drew Falkman joins me today. He brings his stories from his early days in product design when he designed an app for live cattle auctions to now when he is designing open-source products at Syvita Guild, a decentralized autonomous organization building the next generation internet on Bitcoin. Drew, shares some really great learnings from the product world. Stepping back every once in a while to reassess where you are. Roadmaps are a moment in time snapshots and not project plans. Being aware of what purpose we started at all times is critical for any product's success.
Brian Barclay is the Sr Director of Product Design at a Japanese firm Rakuten Americas, In Japanese, Rakuten means “optimism.” a global leader in internet services that empowers individuals, communities, businesses and society by providing value as cashback for goods and services for consumers. Brian brings to the surface the complexities of providing value to the merchants as well as the consumers. He shares how is finds unique opportunities to be relevant and provides an enriching shopping experience to be a trusted shopping companion in the near future.
Travis Gosselin is the principal software engineer at SPS Commerce, the world’s leading retail network, connecting trading partners around the globe to optimize supply chain operations for all retail partners. Travis brings a unique perspective on elevating the experience of the creators - The Developers. He shares his excitement about his next initiative to bring standardization in coding to the developer community and making their work easier. There is a lot packed in this short but powerful episode.
Houshang Livian is the Head of Design at Cloudera, a company that believes data can make what is impossible today, possible tomorrow. If you are curious and looking for the secret sauce to creating delightful products, this episode is for you. Houshang shares an unfolding story of how experimenting with your skills and being curious can pave a path to a career that keeps getting better and better. Houshang also shares how he keeps his passion fed as he influences a strong design thinking culture at Cloudera. You don't want to miss the delightful end of this episode:)
René Insam is the Sr. Director, Product Management & Business Transformation at AIG Retirement Services. René shares the power of culture and change management to enable Digital Transformation at scale. He shares his wins in the enterprise and how it takes thought and perseverance, building upon wins. René shares what Digital Transformation is NOT and what he views as some of the keys to success.
Justin Chappell Joins me from Hyland where he heads the global customer experience for Hyland, which is a leading content services provider that enables thousands of organizations to deliver better experiences to the people they serve. In this episode, Justin shares his approach to earning the Customer's trust and some great tips on how he brings continuous value with continuous engagement, improvement and acting proactively to the voice of the customer. Humanizing customer interactions in this age of customers is what Justin and his team are focusing on.
Brent Kedzierski is the Head of Learning Strategy and Innovation at Shell. We discuss what it takes to globalize knowledge management and make sure an organization is learning faster than the pace of change. This one was really mind-expanding!
Ashish Basaria is the EVP and Head of CX at Firstsource, a team that Digitally Empowers Contact Centers for large enterprises. From existing technologies to emerging technologies, they stitch end-to-end digital contact center experiences. Ashish talks about his juicy failures when Apple disrupted the mobile space to some of his epic successes as a result of his early conditioning of seeing through a customer’s lens. Now, I know what’s behind the scenes that makes me hit the “buy now” button and makes me loyal to the brands I like:)
Nancy Hensley joins me from stats perform and brings a lot of energy from her sports right into this episode, she talks about her rendezvous with data analytics and how she is now commited to making AI consumable with amazing story telling tools that uses live performance data with statistical data to give the sports fans, coaches and players a unique experience as they watch, strategize or play. Nancy invites women to explore exciting sports tech careers and explore this side of the industry. Let's dive into Nancy's sportstech world.
Harshad Agashe joins us from Green Dot Corporation, where he heads the product management for banking as a service platform. Green Dot is a leader in banking products and services for the middle to low income segment, making banking available to consumers and distributors at more than 100,000 locations including retailers and financial services locations. Harshad brings in a very unique perspective, as a leader, he leads with emotional intelligence and believes that bringing empathy can be a game changer when it comes to product design. Let's listen to how he approaches complexities of product design in his role at Green Dot.
Srinivas Gudipati is the VP of IT at USCold Storage, he has a demonstrated history of working in the warehousing and logistics industry for 20 plus years. USCS is a leader in providing highly reliable and cost-effective logistics solutions to the frozen and refrigerated food industry, with 42 world class facilities across 13 states they are committed to giving their customers the competitive edge they need to succeed in the ever-changing business environment especially today.
In this episode, Srini talks about how he is leading transformations by utilizing innovative tools like robotics and automation to enhance the warehouse management systems to be more productive, efficient and safe. He looks forward to bringing the concept of warehouse digital twins and using drones to manage inventory in the near future.
Ebenezer Schubert, Sr. Director of Engineering with Citrix, joins us as a guest on this episode. He shares a lot of his stories from childhood, growing up in India, and building a lot of what he saw on the TV, in real life. He understood that engineering was the right way to go for him in his career and that paved a path for his exciting career in networking, and then later on in data analytics. Now he manages a large and diverse team of engineers from Greece, China, India. In this episode, he gives us a peek into his world and also explains how and why you should focus on building the right 20% of the features that are used by 80% of your users.
Jay Haynes is the founder and CEO of Thrv, a jobs-to-be-done product management software. Jay brings a lot of intelligence into product design strategy and how to keep the focus on it throughout the execution of a product idea. He has a lot of great insights into educating organizations to stay customer focused when they are thinking about innovation. He talks about a unique methodology called Jobs-to-be-done to concretize the purpose of a product
and to keep it on a path to a successful launch.
Saira Kazmi is Senior Director of Enterprise Data Strategy and Engineering at CVS Health. With a strong background in Academia to practice data architecture and more recently jumping into the exciting world of Machine learning engineering work. Saira has had a few U-turns in her career that brought her learnings to be able to break down complex problems to executable smaller projects that are easy to be funded and get people excited in a large enterprise.
Here are some tips and tricks on how you can focus on the priorities in the org and get some cool work done. Saira is getting ready to shape some critical technology initiatives at CVS Health with a team of equally eager to learn and grow technologists.
Lalit Wadhwa, is my guest in this episode. He is the EVP & Chief Technology Officer at Encora, a leader in the large and rapidly growing outsourced product development market. Lalit, brings a lot of insights about data monetization using AI. His core experience as a hardware product engineer shines through this episode, as he talks about starting global teams in various countries to partner with fast growing tech companies who are driving innovation and growth within their industries. He shares that deeper challenge for innovation is the mindset, while technology is easy. This is a great episode, pointing out a few challenges that can be resolved with focusing on Data literacy at all levels in the enterprise, let's dive in.
The Holy Trinity of business. This is the first time we are having a panel discussion on our podcast. I'm super excited to bring to you: The successful combination of marketing, sales and engineering. What happens when everything is in sync. Let's talk to Heather Harlos, Global Marketing Leader of Cloud and MSP, Jason Eberhardt, VP of Cloud and MSP and Alex “Jay” Balan, Director of Security Research, from Bitdefender, a cybersecurity leader delivering best-in-class threat prevention, detection, and response solutions worldwide to families and companies for two decades and really uncover how magic can be created when deep knowledge and real workings from the geek labs come to the customer facing marketing and sales teams and how that conversation now becomes a game-changer.
This team really cares about enabling their customers and giving them peace of mind when it comes to security. Let's dive into this panel discussion, and find out how this team is staying at the top in their industry by serving with the right purpose. There are some golden best practices for keeping your data safe day to day as we work remotely from multiple devices, that you don't want to miss.
Christopher Slee is the Founder, Principal, and Chief Product Officer at AWH, an elite digital product firm from Dublin, Ohio.
As an early starter in technology from the age of 14, Chris has had a very experimental relationship with Technology. His latest venture, IncludeHealth, leverages machine learning, proprietary algorithms, and web camera technology to support a seamless blend of onsite and remote musculoskeletal services for pre-or post op patient recovery and much more. He brings to light a different side of failure, where a great idea can be unsuccessful for not being the right cultural fit. Bringing back our focus to the purpose of design and commercializing that idea by tying the consumers core actions to revenue generation.
Nada Ahmed is the Vice President Digitalization and Transformation at Aker Solutions, a leading engineering company based in Norway that provides the products, systems and services required to unlock energy from sources such as oil, gas and offshore wind. Nada shares how she is bringing the lean startup principles to an industry that is in the middle of a massive transformation as they look to move from fossil fuels to renewable sources in the coming decades. She shares how she has had big wins using lean startup techniques such as design sprints and small co-located teams. Nada expounds on the precise team makeup she recommends as well as how she thinks about prioritizing projects in a space where there are endless possibilities.
Prashant Natarajan is VP of Healthcare Analytics at H2O.ai, a leader in open source AI with a mission to democratize AI for all. Prashant brings a lot of deep demonstrated excellence from - Healthcare, Life Sciences, Insurance, Financial Services - from Deloitte, Oracle, McKesson, and Siemens. At his heart he believes that if you put your hand out there is generosity, trust, and kindness in the world. His passion - as a customer advisor, product leader, and technology strategist - is to demystify technology. He is passionate about making technology accessible, understandable, and usable by everyone in business and user contexts. Prashant is a best-selling author of books that demystify data, analytics, AI-ML, and digital transformation. His next book, Demystifying AI for the Enterprise will be published soon. Listen till the end if you want to get the scoop on what it’s all about.
Adnan Khaleel, Senior Director & Global Sales Strategist at Dell Technologies, shares that the everyday excitement at work is the constantly changing environment that keeps him learning new things. From listening to his customers and translating their voice into solutions. Empowering a team of 50,0000 plus sales teams globally, everyday they are meeting their customers where they are in their digital maturity. There is still a lot to solve which keeps tomorrow as exciting as today for Adnan :)
Travis May is a Director of Workforce Innovation at a major financial services & technology company. He shares his fascinating journey into technology and compliance through the US Military and into private practice in war-torn regions such as Afghanistan and Iraq. He shares lessons in leadership from the literal battlefield and how his time building teams in Kabul have re-framed his thoughts on a globalized workforce. Travis is passionate about the future of work and today he not only is innovating on platforms at his firm, but also more broadly with staff training and team building in this increasingly digitized world.
Mark Palmer is the SVP & General Manager of Analytics, Data Science & Data Virtualization at Tibco Software where he plays a key role in unlocking the potential of real-time data for their clients empowering them to make faster, smarter decisions. In this episode he shines the light on the importance of Democratization of Data and how by making digital information accessible to the average non-technical user organizations are becoming empowered to accelerate their transformation. Listen till the end for some great brand stories.
Kalyana Bedhu is an AI/Machine learning thought leader specializing in integrating digital transformation, data science and processes in the AI space at Ericsson. Kalyana talks about how he is empowering the leaders and executives across the 160 locations of Ericsson with actionable data that makes critical decision making easier and scalable. His work in the area of worker safety using AI is commendable.
Howard Tiersky, the CEO at a digital transformation agency called FROM, helping companies win with today’s customers who reserve their loyalty for brands that deliver elegant and convenient digitally-powered experiences. He brings a lot of knowledge from the early digital era when making a website was considered digital transformation to now when we are executing complex transformations with integrated systems to create bespoke digital experiences. This episode shares about why more than 80% transformations fail and what large brands do about de-risking their big or small initiatives. This one is filled with a lot of popular brand success stories that you don’t want to miss:)
Adam Bleibtreu is the Chief Marketing Officer at two organizations ASGN & Creative Circle where he helps leading corporate enterprises and government organizations develop, implement, and operate critical IT and business solutions through creative staffing and IT solutions.
Adam’s commitment to his team has earned him the honorary title of Chief Emotional Officer, as he focuses on recreating moments of greatness for individuals by matching their skills to the right job. He believes that something happens when a team CLICKS, that’s when GREATNESS occurs.
Rafael Matuk joins us from Chicago, where he is the Sr. Director of Health Solutions at AON, a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions. He shares the importance of exercising good software design principles especially in large enterprises with a lot of baggage of being stuck in old processes. How he is shaking off redundancy and bringing the concepts of agile and lean practices to an old enterprise is very intriguing.
Michel Tricot is the Co-Founder of Airbyte, which is the new open-source data integration platform that syncs data from applications, APIs & databases to data warehouses, lakes and other destinations. Michel is highly thrilled about how his startup is picking up popularity amongst the data science community and freeing up their time by providing ready to use data-connectors and making data more accessible for the right use. With this growth, he is looking to hire talented driven individuals, let’s dive in to see what Airbyte is upto.
Benjamin Gold is the Senior Director of Product Management at Change Healthcare. Ben shares his journey into product management and ultimately into product leadership. In this episode, you'll hear how he approaches product strategy - telling the right story to executives for funding and then translating that down to the individual contributors who will ultimately be completing the work. Ben shares how even in a regulated space like Healthtech you can still leverage the lean startup methodologies - moving quick, changing directions and iterating.
Brad Jaehn is the Vice President of Product Strategy at Arrivia who are specialists in making brands better through the power of travel, on a mission to help people around the world travel better and experience more. Brad shares why talented product managers fail?
He looks at software Products as ecosystems that support a customer’s journey through an experience. Brad answers, what we miss if we don’t see the role of empathy in design and how factors such as mental health and balance play a role in Innovation.
Varghese (Alex) Alexander is a Senior Director of Engineering at UnitedHealth Group. Alex shares his story rising the ranks of engineering leadership and some of the most impactful moves that UnitedHealth Group has made over the years that has resulted in more aligned and happy teams and better business outcomes. He walks through the decisions that leadership made and in some cases leaps of faith that ultimately lead to significantly improved results.
Janine Nock is the Director of User Experience at Freedom Mortgage. Janine has a long career as a UX Design leader working inside large organizations and leading consulting firms. She shares her story from photographer turned UX design pro and many of the lessons she learned along the way. Janine discusses how she looks to build design teams and how she is sharing the gospel of design at Freedom Mortgage as they begin their work to build more digital solutions for their clients.
Anita Jindal is a Senior Director of Engineering at VMware, an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company headquartered in California. Anita shares her journey of how her strong foundations in Physics from her childhood led her into this role where she leads her team as a fearless leader introducing innovations and playing a key role in transforming entire organizations. Her massage to her fellow women professionals is to never give up and always be fearless of what’s next.
Ramesh Tirumala, the Director of Engineering and Digital Strategy at Welbuilt joins me as my first guest from the Food and Beverages industry. Welbuilt is a team of pioneers and innovators with the industry knowledge stretching back nearly a century since 1929. Ramesh brings stories of becoming a creative solutionist, spanning from his mischievous childhood to engineering award winning solutions with his imaginative and pragmatic mindset. He is thrilled to push the boundaries in creative ways to create smart kitchen products that engage with their users in practical ways like never before.
Priyanka Agrawal, Country Head Isobar Consulting, a global digital agency, creating exceptional brand experiences. She also Co-founded Frantal Ink, an award winning design agency in Mumbai. Priyanka’s career has been one bold step after another, sometimes stumbling, then walking and falling, sometimes running and even flying. She leads a large team of designers in creating experience-led transformations for customers across the globe. This passion packed episode touches upon work cultures, people before pixels, women empowerment and messages for the youth entering the design world today.
Ron Herardian is a cybersecurity leader with 25 years of leadership for IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, DevOps, SRE and DevSecOps. Co-founder of a cybersecurity startup. Former head of operations and Chief Security Officer of Cloud Native FinTech SaaS company. In this episode he paints a picture of the evolution of technology from the times of PDA devices, pagers, audio cassettes and sony walkmans to virtualization, wireless devices, becoming cloud native and looking at a future where Zero Trust will be the norm.
Shri Director, Digital Experience at Main Line Health (MLH) is a not-for-profit health system serving acute care hospital facilities, homecare and hospice. Shri is passionate about how she can make people’s life better by creating better user experiences which she feels should never be opinion driven but data driven. She brings some amazing stories in this episode from her career path as it traversed through various industries.
From learning about how data drives the produce delivery to driving a traditional healthcare to their digital future. Shri is excited about her work as she looks forward to bringing more and more data insights to inform designing meaningful user experiences.
Mike Colarossi is the Vice President of Product Line Management, Innovation and Sustainability at Avery Dennison, a global material sciences company. Mike shares stories from being on the ground in China and the hyper-growth he witnessed there and how that shapes how he thinks about risk-taking, moving fast and making mistakes. We explore enterprise innovation and how to prioritize projects across multiple horizons. It is a fascinating discussion about placing bets, making mistakes and innovating in a rapidly changing world.
Lorena Molina-Irizarry is the Director of Operations at the United States Census Open Innovation Labs. Here she’s leading a small but mighty team to reimage how to transform the 14-year cycle of the US Census to empower data scientists and help business leaders access and utilize the treasure trove of big data that the Census bureau tracks.
My guest Ronnie Thomas is the Senior Director of Software Engineering at Werner Enterpries which is among the five largest truckload carriers in the United States who believes in keeping America Moving.
This conversation brings a lot to the surface as we collaborate, contribute and create for the greater good of not only our immediate surroundings but as a member of the communities we live and thrive in. From supercharging digital transformation at Werner to quadruple speeds from a robust infrastructure to enabling cloud solutions to implementing saas platforms and migrating from legacy systems in the near future to making dreams come true for kids that are fighting cancer. Ronnie has a strong purpose and is open to joining hands with like minded people to create a better world.
Asma Malik is the Head of Robotics & Data Science at JPMorgan Chase & Co, a leading global financial services firm with operations servicing clients in more than 100 countries. She shares her interesting career path from being comfortable for a long time to shaking things up and finding herself taking risks and taking on uncomfortable challenges to learn and grow quickly. She is having fun infusing her creativity with advanced data analytics and creating reports with data that tells it’s own story.
Phil Golub is the Executive Creative Director, Digital Product Innovation & Service Design Expert at Symphony Talent, this team is redefining how employers and talent connect. He shares his journey which started in Montreal, Canada with a spiritual and art background to an exciting career in creative software design. He shares how he wants to empower people to do their best work by creating the right products that work in perfect sync just like a musician creates a composition with different instruments playing in harmony to create music.
Sambit Behera is the Vice President for Product Management at BlackRock, a global asset manager helping investors build better financial futures.
Sambit shares his juicy failures which led him on a unique path as a Technologist and Economist, as he creates technology Product & designs User Experiences that solve complex business problems. He keeps his clients' pain at the forefront as he approaches product design and says that a good imagination of putting yourself in your customers, designers, engineers shoes is a key to creating empathy driven products.
Christopher Brereton is the partner and VP of Product at Sidebench which is a strategy, design, and development consultancy based in Los Angeles. Chris brings a fresh perspective to product design with his outcome first approach that dictates the product shape and form. His creative work is powered by the right intention of contributing value in a big way that goes beyond the product itself. He is also launching an apprenticeship program at Sidebench for any tech people out there who want to get a hands on experience into the exciting world of product design.
Kevin Raynolds is the Director of Client Strategy at TruStar Marketing the leaders in Mobile First Voice Search Engine Optimization, serving hospitals and insurers across the country, as well as global industrial clients. Kevin loves designing campaigns and seeing the results both instantly and how they do over time. He shares some great insights from the insurance world about how buying patterns changed during COVID.
Sree Ravela is a Senior Director of IT at Bridgestone Americas, and a dedicated technology team builder and leader. In this episode, he shares his leadership philosophy as well as a number of practical culture hacks for creating effective teams and aligning technology with the business.
Eric Rosenzweig is the VP of Information Technology at QDoba Restaurant Group, where he built the technology team after it was acquired from Jack in the Box by a private equity group. Prior to joining, he led Petco into the digital age while it rapidly scaled. In this episode, Eric stresses the importance of understanding and supporting the business in order to be a highly effective technologist.
Yes!! There is an exciting world where the built structures live digitally:) Badri Hiriyur Founder, CEO at T2D2.ai | VP, Director of CORE AI at Thornton Tomasetti joins us to share his awesome journey from learning seismic engineering to jumping into Computational Mechanics to now finding T2D2 which is a self-learning, AI-based software-as-a-service platform that automatically detects visible damage in a variety of building materials to track and catch small problems before they become big headaches. He is excited about the times we live in where buildings' health can be continuously monitored and looks forward to bringing this immense value to the industry as T2D2 gets ready to expand.
Josh Sharfman is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for the California Association of Realtors. He also teaches computer science at Shalhevet High School and mentors his students through an internship program with the team he manages. In this episode, Josh reveals the ways he helps his team foster empathy with customers and communicate effectively within the organization and beyond.
Aju Joseph is a senior director of Product management at Fiserv, a leading global technology provider serving a major chunk of the financial services industry. In this episode he shares some key things to running a successful product and bringing value. Answering questions like why do we do what we do and creating a shared vision with the org. He talks about the descriptive, predictive and prescriptive insights that inform a product at any stage. There is a lot packed in this short episode.
Emmett Wilson is a Senior Product Manager at American Express. Emmett has seen many different sides of AMEX's innovation and R&D world. He takes us to the frontlines of how an influential bank tackles huge problems such as allowing customers to break up big credit card purchases on a payment plan and acquires customers. Emmett shares tips on how to set innovation teams up for success and to ensure they continue being funded. We discuss the importance of different teams working together - legal, compliance, marketing and product to ensure project success and the ways that the divide between product and marketing continues to shrink.
Diana Alvarado is the Global SUV Product Planner at Infiniti Motor Co. where she’s working to evolve the vehicle of tomorrow - actually 5 years from tomorrow because that’s how far ahead car manufacturers work to launch new vehicles. In this episode, Diana shares how she gained trust in a male-dominated industry and her tips for validating what customers truly want.
Brant Cooper is the NYT best-selling author of The Lean Entrepreneur and CEO of Moves the Needle. In this episode, Brant shares tales of startup crash and burn, and smashes the myth of the born visionary by detailing what it actually takes to be a leader in today’s culture of uncertainty, creativity, innovation, and lean methodologies.
Pratik Dhebri is the Head of Digital Products & User Experience, at CBRE the World’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm. He shares how the right information can be a game changer in the dynamic real estate market. He is constantly working to make the user experience more engaging and meaningful for the brokers, CBRE employees, Investors and occupants of the CBRE facilities. His vision is a unified platform that is real time and a single source of truth and trust for the thousands of users who make CBRE the brand it is today.
Mel Reyes is a 30 year veteran of the tech space who most recently served as the VP, IT Enterprise Program Manager for Synchrony financial services. He’s been the “cleanup guy” sorting out problems for years and in this episode, he shares his framework for bringing the right mindset to solve the people and the tech side of innovation challenges.
My guest Scott Yelton is the senior director of product management at Windstream enterprise. A fast growing organization providing telecommunication, Network and security managed services to businesses and rural areas across the US. Scott shares about how he drives high user adaptation for the products his team develops. Given no budget constraints he would love to engage his developers to make products that are more immersive, user friendly, easier to navigate and great quality for their consumers.
Rodrigo Silveira is a Director of Engineering at Flexport where he and his team are reimagining and transforming the world of freight forwarding. He shares how he went from building operating systems for machines to creating operating systems for organizations and the challenges that come with that because machines are predictable but people are ever-changing.
Ravi Evani is the Vice President, Engineering & Technology at Sapient which is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe. He kicked off my 2021 with a lot of great insights, Ravi shares how he sees failures and successes. How to watch out for and handle the common but invisible pitfalls that most orgs face as they prioritize their Digital transformation initiatives. From failures to a vision of a radically easily digitally accelerated future for orgs, there’s a lot packed in this episode that you will find valuable.
My guest Priyanka Angadi is a Data Science Manager at PWC cybersecurity team. She shares her passion for Data Science and her exciting journey of 8 years working with diverse data in diverse industries from Pharma to BioTech to Media-tech and now she is ready to get her hands into Cyber security. Curiosity has been her friend throughout her growth, she has gone beyond her role to explore and volunteered to contribute in projects across the org which infused more cross functional knowledge into her job. There is a lot to pick up in this wisdom packed episode.
Pavan Pidugu is the Chief Technology Officer of FMCSA within the Department of Transportation. Pavan recently transitioned to the public sector after a long career in technology innovation within retail. You'll hear his inspirational story of helping grow people around him and many of his approaches to impactful technology. Pavan shares how he is working to bring an Outcome based methodology to the Department of Transportation and what impact working in the public sector has had on his approaches to technology and innovation!
Amanda S. Powell is a UX designer at Home Depot. This role was the first role where she got challenged like never before and spent the toughest months of her work life yet. She shares how she overcame her anxiety by asking the right questions and showing the stakeholders the process of design thinking firsthand. Her exciting journey as a UX designer is just starting and she is ready to make an impact with her designs especially in the accessibility area which she has a special passion for.
Jacob Rubin is the youngest entrepreneur guest I have had so far:) He has been fascinated about building things since a kid. He is already the founder of a startup called Skipit, in his third year at Northeastern University. He talks about the exciting path this venture is taking him and his partner as they get ready to launch their new app Skipit in Boston. This episode is the curtain raiser for what’s to come.
Andrew is the VP of Technology at Lazaridis School of Business and Economics in Ontario, Canada. In this episode he shares great wisdom as a young guy who lost his first job starting out and how that led him to knock on a few hundred doors. Only to discover a unique way to communicate: How awesome he is! Which made some great brands like Shopify and Blackberry pick him from the crowd. His attitude about life also reflects in his work as he designs software products, let’s find out more:)