Join us on Friday, February 10th, from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM for an alumni panel conversation on Strategic Design in uncertain times. The conversation will be moderated by Claire Zhuang (SDM’23) with panelists Lauren Stobierski (SDM ’22), product designer at UBS; Juliette Wang (SDM ’22), interaction designer at Google; and Nishant Wazir (SDM ’22), strategist and designer at Openshop. To know more about the panelists’ experience and thoughts around MS SDM program, please check out their alumni stories.

The panel will be virtual. All MS SDM students are invited.

Event Sign Up Portal CLosed

Quotes from the Panel

Juliette Wang:

• “A lot of the basis for product design is strategy”
• “In terms of portfolio, you have to see what the companies are looking for, every company kind of has specific things they are looking for”

Lauren Stobierski:

• “In more traditional company, it takes a lot of education for the value of design and that definitely is a pain point”
• “Our role is to quickly push out those insights. We could spend weeks or months digging deeper, but you have to take a step back and understand from a macro perspective and see what’s really important”

Nishant Wazir:

• “The discussion guides and all those artifacts for research are so important, the mistake we often make is that we try and bring quantitative weightage to qualitative research and when we do qualitative research it is far more valuable, and we mine a lot of insights that way”
• “If you strategize in isolation its not grounded in reality”
• “I think we all grapple with the question of how to overcome the revenue questions when trying to sell the value of design, and I don’t know that thats been solved, but I would encourage anyone grappling with that to look at the impact or social impact space, a lot of innovation happens there how value is measure, how impact is measured”
• “I know a lot of really capable people impacted by the layoffs, some of the best designers I know, I dont know if this is an opportunity or reminder but it’s clear how we need to design more resilient organizations that aren’t so flaky”
• “As far as portfolios go, focus on quality and not quantity. It does not matter if you have a large diverse folio of work, be intentional about the story the portfolio is telling and who the audience is”