Speakers
Anisha Jain
Anisha is currently lead Product Design at Cruise Automation. Her previous experience has spanned Dropbox, Facebook, design consulting at IDEO, Hot Studio, and a Danish consultancy called 3PART; and teaching 7th grade science in Oakland. She has an MS in Product Design and Innovation Strategy from Stanford, a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.
About the talk
Crafting culture to design better products
As design leaders, we often can't resist creating a bespoke design team culture. It's not uncommon for design teams to feel like creative oases within companies. This can take a massive amount of work, but unfortunately the outcome of this effort isn't always good. Sometimes, if we are too different from what the rest of our company values, we lose our ability to effectively collaborate with our cross-functional partners and influence product direction.
In this talk, Anisha will reflect on her experiences as a third-culture-kid, a former 7th grade science teacher, and in establishing and growing design teams within Facebook, Dropbox, and Cruise. She will help the audience evaluate when to adapt to an existing culture vs. when to craft a different one. She will also share strategies, tools, and examples for how to gracefully create culture change in lockstep with the broader company when it's necessary. By crafting culture intentionally, we can create design teams that thrive within any company's value system, develop happier and more inclusive teams, and shift broader company norms in a way that enables companies to design better products and services.