DesignOps Global Conference 2022

Presenter Profile: Claire is a seasoned design leader and formerly an award-winning college-level design educator. She currently leads a team of 8 designers and one user researcher at BlackLine, a leading cloud software provider that automates and controls financial close and accounting processes. Claire is passionate about building scalable & repeatable processes and best practices in design teams and organizations for operational efficiency and motivating and empowering the next generation of design leaders. During the past two decades, Claire helped create and deliver a wide range of meaningful products and services for enterprise SaaS, consumer products, governments, and non-profit organizations and have instructed and mentored hundreds of students and designers. Outside of work, Claire volunteers to continue her passion for empowering the next generation as a board member of the PLUS ME project, a community partner dedicated to empowering middle and high school students to increase their confidence for college, career, and community advancement teaching the art of storytelling. Claire holds an MFA in Media Design from ArtCenter College of Design and is an NN/g certified UX professional and a Certified Scrum Master.

Presentation Title: ‘Being Inclusive  – Building A Diverse Design Team’

Outline: People play a critical role in driving and implementing efficient DesignOps at organizations—they define and agree on a collaboration model, process standardization, success metrics, etc. Having diversity in people will naturally bring various viewpoints to the conversations and agreements. However, it is a known fact that the tech space is male dominant today. There are only roughly 37% of women in UX leadership positions, although women make up over half of the workforce. As a design leader, what can we do to close the gender gap? Is there anything else we can do beyond “the obvious” to create a diverse team? Where should we focus, and what should we let go? Claire will talk about her journey of building, managing, and nurturing an inclusive design team that could lower the bias and expands the boundary.

Company Website: https://www.blackline.com