Twisha Shah Brandenburg
Twisha Shah-Brandenburg is a design leader, educator, and strategist with over a decade of experience guiding Fortune 50 companies and startups through transformation. She has led design at Target, BMW, and Venmo, where she helped launch large-scale initiatives like loyalty ecosystems, global booking platforms, and Venmo’s first credit card. Her leadership focuses on turning design into a strategic lever for business impact while nurturing cross-functional collaboration.
In addition to her industry work, Twisha teaches design innovation and interaction design at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where she equips the next generation of technologists and leaders to embrace human-centered practices. She also writes Making an Impact, a publication on Substack that explores design leadership, organizational maturity, and sustainable success. Her thought leadership on metrics, culture, and regenerative leadership has been shared on international stages and in leading design forums.
Presentations
UX Camp Winter 2026
From Resistance to Reinvention: The Human Work of Design Maturity
We talk about design maturity as if it’s a process problem, more methods, more playbooks, more frameworks. But the truth is, most of the resistance leaders face has less to do with design skills and more to do with human dynamics: trust, alignment, and the willingness to reinvent. In this talk, Twisha Shah-Brandenburg explores how to navigate the messy middle of design maturity by treating it as human work.
