Kai Haley
Kai is an experienced leader in the Design and Innovation Industry, who has developed vision, strategy and launches for both Google product teams and it’s top partners. As Head of UX Methods and Process, she creates and scales programs to enable the culture and mindsets that drive improved product quality. As one of the founders and leads of the Google Sprint Master Academy, she has trained over 800 Sprint Masters to drive innovation across Google’s diverse product areas. She is passionate about creating and teaching human-centered methodologies that increase cross-functional collaboration to create more meaningful products that improve people’s lives and the world. Prior to leading UX Methods and Process, she founded the Design Relations team to support design excellence on Google platforms and she drove monetization opportunities on the Search Ads team in Google Search. She earned a Masters Degree in Design from CCA, where she focused sustainable design practices and creating positive impact in the world.
Jackie Colburn
Jackie has been leading the creation of digital experiences for over a decade; everything from emerging startups to critical strategic efforts for fortune 50 businesses. She’s worked with teams of all shapes and sizes, leading strategy and helping them co-create, test, and build solutions.
Jackie launched her own practice in 2017, focused on facilitating Design Sprints. She's run Sprints for clients including Ameriprise Financial, US Bank, and Best Buy. She's had the opportunity to teach people how Sprint during training bootcamps, with John Zeratsky, co-author of the Sprint Book, and leads training initiatives for product teams in startup and corporate settings. She co-authored a Remote Sprint Guide with (John and Jake, authors of Sprint) at the start of the COVID19 pandemic to help teams move to remote collaboration more easily.
Jackie thrives when the problem is hard and the team is ready to make a change but doesn’t quite know what to do, or how. She has proven that openness and optimism accelerate our collective potential to make great things happen.
She is passionate about designing products and services that improve people’s lives. She believes that technology has the potential to make us all better and is a tool that should be used for good.
Ed Orozco
Design strategist and UX consultant working at the intersection of business strategy and design thinking.
Head of Strategy at the award-winning design firm WANDR. Helping clients like IBM, WWF, and the US Air Force, reach their business objectives by improving the usability and overall user experience of their digital products.
Katie Swindler
Katie leads the experience strategy for Allstate online marketing products including the Allstate.com quoting experiences and My Account. Originally educated as a theatre director, she brings a unique perspective to digital work. She believes if brands wish to truly connect with consumers they must combine emotion and utility, storytelling and technology. Prior to joining Allstate, Katie was a UX Director at FCB Chicago where she was the UX lead on the 2016 global redesign of JackDaniels.com as well as leading experience design for many other clients such as Cox Communications, and Toyota Financial Services.
Surya Vanka
Surya Vanka is a transdisciplinary designer who has worked at the leading edge of physical and digital experiences. He is founder of Authentic Design, president emeritus of the Seattle Design Festival and was chair of Interaction Week. Surya was director of user experience at Microsoft, a tenured professor of design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study. Surya is creator of Design Swarms method, a lightweight design technique used in business, non-profit and education worldwide, and has been used at companies like Amazon, Amgen, Autodesk, Callison, Deutsche Bank, Lilly, T-Mobile, Microsoft, and REI.
Surya won the Microsoft Engineering Best Practice Awards twice, Ohio State University 50th Anniversary Distinguished Design Alumnus Award, Microsoft Achievement Award, Accessibility Achievement Award, World Brand Congress Leadership Award and several other industry recognitions. He is member of Word Design Organization, served on the jury of global design awards like Singapore Design Mark and on the boards of organizations like the Design Management Institute, Seattle Interactive and Design in Public. He frequently keynotes speeches at the most prestigious conferences and has won top speaker awards three times. His work has appeared in numerous publications and news programs, including TEDx, Form, I.D., Design Council, WIRED, Interactions, the BBC and National Public Radio. Surya is the author of two books on design, several publications, and has taught design on every continent but Antarctica.
Jake Knapp
Jake spent 10 years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the Design Sprint process. He’s written two books, Sprint and Make Time, coached teams at places like Slack, LEGO, IDEO, and NASA on design strategy and time management, and has been a guest instructor at MIT and the Harvard Business School.
Previously, Jake co-founded Google Meet and helped build products like Gmail and Microsoft Encarta. He is currently among the world’s tallest designers.