Katie Silvers is the Director of Design and UX at Salesforce and is an expert in aligning business needs and communication with core leadership. Before joining Salesforce, Katie was a manager of Corporate Strategy and Innovation at the Arielle X Group and LexisNexis. She specializes in Design Thinking tools and Agile methodologies and believes product and process innovation is an indispensable element in business growth. Katie leads an international design and research team responsible for creating productivity and efficiency tools for the internal sales organization.
This week on the Optimistic Design podcast, Katie joins us to give her perspective on the role of design lead innovation in technology as an industry as a whole. She shares the non-tradition route she took into the design world and how her current role at Salesforce works to drive collaboration between designers and developers. We also dig into Katie’s actionable advice for other leaders scaling design and innovation teams in large organizations, particularly in today’s economic climate.
“The customer is at the center — whether it's an internal customer or an external customer, they're always top of mind.” - Katie Silvers
“I'm optimistic about the fact that people are taking design seriously. People always knew it was part of the process but never saw it as a key piece” - Katie Silvers
In this Episode
03:03 What influenced Katie’s approach to design and innovation at the start of her career
05:38 What characterizes Salesforce’s approach to design lead innovation
09:49 The relationship between incubation of ideas and design technology
13:29 Katie’s thoughts on what is so unique about working with an in-house sales team
18:24 Salesforce is a CRM company with a long history of using data-driven insights and analytics, so Katie describes how that history influences her team’s approach to their work
19:29 How Salesforce has evolved as a designer and research organization and what is coming next for the company
21:43 How design innovation can scale and grow within a large organization like Salesforce
27:01 Developments in the future of design and innovation that Katie is optimistic about
Resources and Social
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Podcast: Podcast
LinkedIn: LinkedIn
Twitter: Twitter
Website: Website
