Fail Faster

A seasoned product leader, startup advisor, and speaker, Govind Wakhlu, joins us for an insightful conversation about his exciting journey of self-discovery as a leader. Govind shares how continuous learning and unlearning at speed correlate to business success at a corporate and individual level. What do companies need to focus on as they navigate dynamic markets? How can we achieve clarity of purpose by aligning individual success with that of the organization? Govind shares great tools and tips for leadership behavior that fosters authenticity, trust, and a true human connection leading to a culture of belonging.

Can you imagine the macro impact any business could create if all individuals in the organization were to execute with a high sense of belonging?

Ashley Park is a former design head of Customization and Personalization UX at Google. She continues expanding her territory as an entrepreneur and a professor for meaningful contributions to art and design communities. Ashley's creative endeavor has followed her passion for crafting a lifestyle product that changes people's perspective toward technologies and helps build trust.

Gretchen Rodriguez, Chief Product Officer at Crediverso is an Entrepreneurial-minded Product Leader with experience designing and launching global financial and non-financial products in multiple areas such as Fintech, e-commerce, Cybersecurity, Identity & Trust.

She is a Computer Science Engineer and has developed her professional career in areas like Product development, Business growth, and Tech Consulting. She is building a one-stop financial solution for Hispanics in the US and has previously worked for other big companies like eBay and Santander Bank.

Stuart Silverstein,Director, Service Design & UX at Corebridge Financial with over 20 years of design experience. His focus as a designer is to make work better for both design teams, internal employees, or end users doing repetitive or complex tasks. He has worked both agency side for brands like T-Mobile, Mattel, CiCi's Pizza, Mr Cooper and more and in-house for companies like LegalZoom, Fandango, and REX Real Estate, as well as his current position at Corebridge Financial (which was previously AIG), where he serves as Director of Service Design and UX, working across technologies including web, enterprise apps, voice and mobile.

Amanda Willis, Portfolio head of UX Design for Authentication, KYC, and ID platform at U.S. Bank joins us to share her unique path from Journalism to UX Design. Amanda was living and breathing agile at its core as she designed the front page breaking news by telling the stories in a different way. She was in her journalism prime when the Obama election news made its rounds in the media. Amanda brings valuable design principles, process discipline, and reliability from being on the front line to her role as a Design leader handling critical security and authentication products and platforms at US Bank. She is passionate about having a deep connection with her team outside of work and is looking forward to embarking on massive initiatives that involve changing deep-rooted customer behaviors towards better experiences and outcomes.

Emily Schmidt, Lead, Behaviour Design at ATB Financial is an applied behavioural scientist who helps companies use behavioural science and behavioural economics principles to create better client experiences, services and products. Emily currently leads the behavioural practice at ATB Financial, where she collaboratively stood up the organization's behavioural department. She delivers value across the organization by identifying objectives, designing interventions and consulting on business problems to create lasting behaviour change amongst clients and team members. With a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing and a Master of Arts in Behavioural Economics, Emily's current area of focus is client behavior and understanding the unconscious factors that drive client decision making. Emily's research centers specifically on the heuristics at play in consumer perceptions and likelihood to advocate for a brand. Prior to working in behavioural science, Emily spent over 10 years as a senior marketer within the tourism and environmental education industries where she crafted marketing strategies rooted in consumer psychology and behavioural signaling to promote and deliver exceptional experiences. She has led multi-disciplinary teams spanning paid media, earned media, influencer marketing, owned content, social media, digital marketing and B2B marketing to deliver integrated marketing programs which span the consumer journey and drive results. Emily passionately believes in understanding consumer psychology to design experiences, brands, and communications that resonate with audiences. Emily has served on various advisory committees across industry and academia, and has spoken at conferences and sessions across the marketing, client experience and behavioural science domains to help deepen human-centric thinking and foster the emerging behavioural design community.

Vikash has over 15 years of professional experience in the Technology industry, and he loves solving complex problems at scale. He has a bachelor's degree in Technology and MBA in Marketing & Strategy. He tried different professions before discovering his passion for Product Management. He started as a Software Engineer at Accenture, then worked as a Consulting Manager at Cognizant, Sr. Product Manager at Amazon (Fortune 2 Company), Principal Product Manager at Flavorcloud and currently he is a Director of Product Management at Walmart (Fortune 1 Company). He is very passionate about mentoring and coaching his team, bringing out the best in them at work and making a difference by building products customer love!

Jaladhi is a UX design leader with 17 years of experience in delivering products people love. He leads the Product Design, User Research, and Technical & UX Writing teams at Braze, a customer engagement platform. Before joining Braze, he was leading an amazing team of designers across LinkedIn Feed, Video, Creators, News, Events, and Search. He is passionate about Design's role in driving innovation and delivering outsize value to the business as well as building a collaborative and growth-oriented design culture to allow people to create their best work.

Raghu has over 22 years of experience leading technology initiatives across consumer internet, retail and eAuction; conceiving and implementing technology products and high transactional platforms for Internet Retailer top 100 websites. For the last couple of years, he was leading the digital transformation initiatives at CapitalOne, Target and JCPenney, moving from monolith packaged eCommerce solutions (Oracle/IBM) to home-grown microservices, cloud based architecture.

Currently he is leading the engineering for enteprise Personalzation/Experiementation, Content Management, Enterprise ClickStream and analytics platforms. In his previous job, he spent all his time working on every facet of Retail from eCommerce, Enterprise Price/Promo systems, Item Management Systems,Assortment Planning, Inventory management systems for Internet retailer top 100 retailers. Raghu holds a Masters degree in Computer applications, India. He started his career as a software engineer and throughout his career, has held a wide range of roles as lead engineer, Architect, Engineering Manager, Capability Product Owner.