Billie Mandel
Billie Mandel is a multidisciplinary social scientist, leadership coach and team collaboration expert with 30 years’ international business experience leading software R&D teams to innovate, grow and create more effectively together.
As a first-wave UXer and (often token) out lesbian leader, and now as a leadership and collaboration coach for women and feminist professionals and teams, she’s spent decades in your boardrooms watching you make the same mistakes over and over. Now that she’s a self-employed CEO, living her best life in her Sea Witch era, she’s fully empowered to tell all the tales and spill all the tea, for our collective amusement, benefit, and growth.
Her company, Mandel Creative, is a queer feminist learning and development consultancy and innovation incubator for creative and technical professionals and teams, and has some spicy new programs coming up! Subscribe to her mailing list at www.billiemandel.com and follow her on LinkedIn to hear the news when it’s fresh and hot!
Presentations
UX Camp Winter 2026
The AI Reality Check: Hype, Harm, and How UX Leads
AI is showing up everywhere in our work, but the conversation often splits into extremes: productivity hacks, debates about creativity, or fear-driven doom. This session pulls the useful threads into one conversation.
Join Billie Mandel and Jessica DeMartini for a candid, interactive discussion on what’s newly possible, what deserves real concern, and how UX can lead with clarity. We’ll separate hype from reality, name the risks that matter, and share practical ways to build perspective and confidence, whether you’re experimenting by choice or feeling pressure to add AI to everything.
Tent Talks Session: AITA – Tech Industry Edition: Top 5 mistakes well-meaning people are making RIGHT NOW in their jobs that make their workplaces more toxic, how to stop, and what to do instead
On Wednesday, August 30th at 5:00pm Central, Billie Mandel joins us for a live Q&A session: “AITA: Tech Industry Edition – Top 5 mistakes well-meaning people are making RIGHT NOW in their jobs that make their workplaces more toxic, how to stop, and what to do instead.”
