Interaction 20

Red Room, MiCo

Fri 7 Feb

15:30-15:50, 20 min

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Five ways to redesign the designer to maximize business impact #design #Leadership #DesignThinking #businessimpact

Designers have long advocated for "a seat at the table” - to be involved early in the process, and influence strategic product decisions. The good news is that our wish is starting to come true. Organizations are appointing designers at senior levels, and designers are involved earlier in the product development process. Business leaders are looking to design to help transformation their organizations and designers to be catalysts of this change.

While this is indeed good news, the phrase "be careful what you wish for, for it may come true" is apt here. Being involved early comes with ambiguity and requires a new skillset and mindset that we did not learn in design school.

In this talk, I will share five ways in which, we, design leaders can set our teams up for success in this new environment. We can help our teams develop these new skillsets and mindsets. We can indeed, redesign the designer.

About the speaker

Janaki Kumar

I am the Head of Design at JP Morgan Chase’s Commercial Bank, where we combine Fintech and Proptech with best in class user experience to delight our customers. Our mission is to humanize financial services by re-imagining the end to end customer experience, and to spark a culture of innovation.

Previously, I was the head of the Design and Co-Innovation Center at SAP Labs, Palo Alto, and delivered award-winning products and services that help businesses transform the way they work. I build, coach and inspire high-performance design teams, leveraging design-thinking, customer empathy, and co-innovation.

I co-authored the book Gamification at Work – Designing Engaging Business Software. I am a TEDx speaker and a co-instructor at Stanford’s Graduate School Business LEAD course on Customer Experience Design: A Neuroscience Perspective. I am an inventor on over 20 patents. I have a MS in MIS from Boston University, and attended the Executive Leadership Program at Stanford University.