Kara Fitzpatrick
Kara’s background is a mix of private and public sector, including Director of Experience Design on the Cancer Moonshot for then-Vice President Biden in 2016 and Senior Advisor in the Biden-Harris White House. Most recently, she was Head of Change Leadership & Strategic Initiatives for the Small Business & Self-Employed Group at Intuit. Prior, she was Chief of Staff for the Intuit QuickBooks Platform team and appointed to the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows. During the first 100 days of the pandemic, Kara led the State of California’s Data Insights Working Group that delivered sentiment and mobility insights daily to the Governor and his senior staff, enabling the Administration to make key policy decisions. She founded and executive produced TEDxIntuit, and worked at 18F, the Oscars, Emmys, Super Bowl, and Women’s World Cup.
Kara does pro-bono product strategy for non-profits; taught micro-entrepreneur women human centered design in rural India; and guest lectured at UC San Diego STEM Academy, Stanford, and Harvard. She double majored in theater and English at Elizabethtown College, graduated summa cum laude from Penn State with a masters in instructional design, and was San Diego Woman of the Year finalist.
Presentations
Tent Talks
Tools, Trust, and Transformation: A Guide to Modern Mentorship
Join Kara Fitzpatrick, former Director of Experience Design in the Obama White House, for an insightful conversation on mentorship and coaching. Drawing on years of experience spanning government innovation, private sector leadership, and teaching human-centered design, Kara will share her perspective on structured vs. unstructured mentoring and how to set up both mentors and mentees for success. With practical tools, actionable advice, and a thoughtful approach to fostering growth, Kara’s session will offer something for professionals at all stages of their careers.
Whether you’re mentoring someone for the first time, seeking guidance in your own career, or curious about applying mentorship principles in community-focused work, this Tent Talk promises actionable takeaways and inspiring ideas to elevate your approach to mentoring and coaching.
Leadership By Design 2018
The Leaders Guide to the Care & Feeding of Humans
Health and wellness of an organization’s or project’s performance can be relatively simple. In a snapshot we can know a lot–dashboards and metrics tell us lots about how well our work is progressing, what mile stones we’re reaching, and what color-coded alert state of panic we should be in. And we can optimize our way into just about any green-colored diagram we choose.
Teams, and the humans that comprise them, are fascinatingly complex and complicated. In a snapshot, we can fool ourselves into believing all kinds of things about them. And yet, we can’t really know for sure unless we dive in deeper and learn about their health, their needs, and try to help them optimize for their individual successes. In this presentation, Kara shares her approach to the care and feeding of humans, sharing lessons gleaned from working at the highest echelons of sports, entertainment, government, and technology.
