Speakers
Payal Wadhwa
Payal is on a deliberate and conscious journey to affect change as a creative leader. She leads teams of inspiring designers, product managers and technologists and holds dear the tenets of good collaboration, curiosity, craft and continuous learning.
Over the last two decades, she has worked at agencies like Fjord, Imagination, Idean and frog amongst others. She embraces deep empathy, robust decision-making, strategic foresight, understanding why people get out of bed in the morning and keeping her head on her shoulders - all whilst driving progressive and holistic business growth and inclusion. On the leadership team at frog, she led the formidable task of integrating four different agencies into what is today, frog.
Idean, Rufus Leonard, frog design and Fahrenheit 212 came together when bought by Capgemini, a global consulting firm. Payal led this merger and the integration of teams into coherence for the UK business and is possibly greyer for it!
She’s curious about where the interplay between design, technology, data and societal transformation leads us and advocates the need to go gentler into the future. Payal loves a challenge that allows her to wade into ever-pervasive complexity and she reads without prejudice. Unless it’s badly typeset.
About the talk
Raising the bar: Transcending the debate around quality
You're a leader. You've come to be one by being good at your design craft or by being good at managing people - or possibly both. And so, yes - you care deeply about quality.
After nearly two decades in the field, having been a part of incredible studios such as frog, Fjord, and Idean, Payal is currently taking a career break. She is using this time for extensive travel and some reflection on the conundrums of design, product innovation and strategy practices today.
This talk will look at how as leaders we can use our power and presence to raise the bar of quality in our organisations. Payal will lay bare the foundations of what it will take to rejuvenate and rethink our design/+product leadership to impact business consciousness and a world in flux.
Expect emerging clarity around the role she’s understood herself to have play well, what the role of leadership demands of us, and what it means to raise the bar. And hold it high. And how, that itself - isn’t enough.