Leadership By Design 2016

Adam’s work focuses on helping teams and organisations strengthen and grow their human-centered design and innovation capabilities. As a design leader, Adam’s work blends systems thinking, HCD, anthropology, and organisational behaviour to foster more collaborative, creative and customer-centric organisations.

Rebecca Miller-Webster is a software engineer, conference organizer, and educator. She is the founder of Write/Speak/Code and Practice Lead at DevMynd.

Ashleigh Axios is a speaker, strategic creative, and an advocate for design’s ability to break barriers and create positive social change. She is Chief Experience Officer and a Partner at Coforma, a digital consultancy and design firm that crafts creative solutions and builds technology products that support communities.

Chris is a Vice President, Head of Design who leads teams, drives product strategy, and helps executives understand the value of design. He has championed design, research, and content strategy to improve the services people use every day in organizations of all sizes and industries around the globe.

Gail Swanson helps people solve product and service problems without blowing themselves up. Throughout her design career across many industries, she’s been dedicated to helping talented folks be effective at their jobs. Gail built the strategy practice at 18F, and has returned to public service improving the experience of disaster survivors as they recover and rebuild. Gail speaks and writes about all manners of design, strategy, and digital innovation.

Erin Thomas is Diversity Manager for Grant Thornton LLP, responsible for diversity and inclusion strategy, programming and evaluation in all 60 US offices.

Kristin Skinner is Managing Director at Adaptive Path where she established and leads the Design Program Management practice.

For the past 25+ years, Xavier has driven successful brand solutions for a range of Fortune 500 companies.

Amanda Schonfeld is a talent acquistion nerd. Hiring designers is her true love, but she also spends quality time with technologists, strategists, product folks, and client services people too.

Amy Cueva believes that design can improve the human condition. It was with that mission and vision that she co-founded Mad*Pow in 2000 and has built an award-winning design and digital agency which serves industries from health to financial services and beyond.

Randy J. Hunt is VP of Design at Etsy, where he leads a team of designers, researchers, writers and artists creating the end-to-end experience, both online and off.

Cennydd Bowles is a digital product designer and writer. He has a decade of experience helping companies realise the benefits of good design, most recently as design manager at Twitter.

Tanseela leads the design research and universal design efforts at United Airlines. The research team informs the vision, experience and execution of inspiring, useful, and profitable travel products and services.

Adam Cutler is the Design Practices Director with IBM Design and one of the first three Distinguished Designers at IBM. He is responsible for the IBM Design Studio in Austin, TX.

Over the past 20+ years Ian Swinson has balanced his time between agencies, startups and enterprise software companies. As the first designer at Salesforce.com he was instrumental in growing the UX team to over 100.

Michael Lopp is a Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at companies such as Borland, Netscape, Palantir, and Apple.