Show Summary

Katie Luby will be graduating this spring from the MIT Sloan Fellows program, and can’t say enough good things about the experience. Coming from Salesforce, and with an anthropology and design educational background, business school was a whole new animal. Katie feels her experience at MIT Sloan Fellows will uniquely enhance her work as a human-centered design practitioner, especially in the areas of technology implementation, innovation, and leadership. While she has gained many tools to help her in her work, the most meaningful aspect of her time at MIT Sloan has been the relationships she has developed with the other Fellows. With a diverse cohort from all around the world, the exposure to new ways of thinking and working has been unparalleled. Add in the fact that her 8 ½ year old daughter has been with her throughout the experience, and she wouldn’t change a thing.

Show Notes

Our guest today, is Katie Luby, MIT Sloan Fellow, MBA student, and Innovation and Transformation Director, Design Architect at Salesforce. Katie started out studying movies, earned her master’s in design from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and worked in tech for companies like Motorola, Sapient, and Razorfish before landing at Salesforce, where she has been since 2013, except for her current stay in Boston as an MIT Sloan Fellow.

Can you tell us about your background? Where you grew up? What do you like to do for fun? [2:10]

I am from Chicago, born and raised in Evanston. It is a great city to be in, with lots of swimming, bike riding, great culture and museums. During most of my free time I try to get outside and enjoy some of the cultural offerings. In Boston there is also great culture, and a little smaller city which is nice, and I am really looking forward to spring right now since the weather has been “interesting.”

You started out studying film and cinematography and then did a Masters in Design. How did you go from the movies to design? [3:17]

I feel like I have a pretty windy path, but also feel like everything I have done really has built on itself. In undergrad I studied anthropology, so I’ve always been interested in the study of people and behaviors and culture. Coming out of school, applied anthropology didn’t really exist in the field – you really had to go to a tribe to study, we really couldn’t study ourselves, and between the time I graduated and then got a masters suddenly ethnography was being used as a tool with all sorts of design problems, business problems, cultural problems – so that fell into place. Between my undergrad and masters I worked on documentary films and film production. I spent some time in San Francisco and then came back to Chicago, working with a lot of really smart creative people in advertising. I worked in teams to make advertising ideas come alive, sourcing materials, building things, conceptualizing ideas in real form, dealing with budgets, and problem solving. I never considered myself a creative, but loved the idea of design and art direction looking to solve a problem. When I found the institute of design, one of just a few programs in the country that accepts people in their masters program without an undergrad degree in design, I learned theory and practice around how to solve problems with a design perspective. A hot topic now is design thinking, and it is really the perspective of who the users are and what the issue at hand is. Are we looking at the right problem? Coming up with creative and elegant solutions to meet that need?