Meet our Speakers
Jan Chipchase
Jan is the founder of Studio D Radiodurans - a research, design and strategy consultancy that conducts projects for clients with a global remit. He was previously Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog Design and Principal Scientist at Nokia.
Asif Baki
Asif enjoys building meaningful experiences and viable businesses by developing an in-depth understanding of user needs in the proper context with an appreciation for the diversity of cultures, abilities and desires. He has years of global experience working with the likes of Google and Microsoft.
Jayawant Tewari
Jayawant leads a team of designers, researchers, writers, and UX engineers at Microsoft India. His team’s remit includes experiences in Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Search + AI. He is passionate about product innovation, design leadership, and diversity + inclusion.
Muzayun Mukhtar
Muzayun leads research for Google Search in India, focusing on making the internet useful and usable for the next billion users. She specializes in people-centered product design, ethnographic field research, usability and trend forecasting. She is especially passionate about technological interventions in complex social problems.
Anshumani Ruddra
Anshumani has spent 19 years crafting experiences and products - first as an author of children’s books, then as a game designer, followed by a product manager with consumer tech biz in gaming, messaging, healthcare, education and more. He believes that magic happens at the intersection of tech, storytelling, media, pop culture, and human behaviour.
Eshita Priyadarshini
Eshita is a design leader with over 16 years of work experience in leading and coaching teams to develop digital experiences that continue to impact millions of users from around the world. She leads with intuition to elevate the teams and create the right environment to find their purpose and innovate.
Ripul Kumar
Ripul leads UX Design for Oracle and has built design and research teams that have successfully delivered several global UX projects in over 5 organizations and worked with Fortune 100 clients like Microsoft, Nokia, Lufthansa, Google, Facebook, Philips, Sony. He is also passionate about teaching, and mentors several organizations.
Parameswaran Venkataraman
Param has over 25 years of experience in design and innovation leadership roles across companies like Tata Digital, IDEO, Fractal.ai, Dr. Reddy’s, Kantar, GE Healthcare and Sapient. He began his career in Interaction design, transitioned into Design Research & Strategy, and has set up and established strategic design capabilities in several organizations.
Achyutha Sharma
Achyutha has over 17 years of experience leading product, business & UX research functions while working in B2C, D2C and B2B sectors. He has led the largest research team of 12 among startups and brought in actionable strategies and innovation in his work. He specializes in working for women demographics, SMEs/ SMB and emerging tech.
Divya Chaddha
Divya, an engineer-turned-design researcher, has consulted and led research and strategic initiatives for organizations like Google, Mahindra & Mahindra, Samsung, Medtronics and more. Her passion lies in user-centric research methodologies for insights and business innovation, megatrend spotting and creating future business scenarios.
Nikhita Ghugri
Nikhita is a co-founder of Xeno Co-lab and a design expert with experience in managing product and service innovation cases. She has wide experience in design research, innovation strategy and implementing projects across industries including financial inclusion, healthcare, fintech, and in designing services for marginalized and vulnerable communities.
Kathy Leake
Kathy is a 4x entrepreneur who has received several awards including the Forbes "Top 11 Women Who Started Amazing Companies". She believes that for companies to achieve their AI goals, they need to create more inclusivity for women in the roles as data scientists and ML roles; which she tries to achieve at the current organisation she founded - Crux Intelligence.
Arvind Lodaya
Arvind is a professor of design at Vidyashilp University. He started out designing industrial and consumer products for brands like Bajaj and Kirloskar, served as a CD at Ogilvy, and Dean [Research] at Srishti. His current interests include - wicked problems, and integrating design with deep values, among many others.
Veena Sonwalkar
Veena is a studio head at Frog Design, Bangalore - a leading design and innovation consulting firm of Capgemini Invent. She is a design thought leader with 19 years of experience in UX consulting, building and leading teams across geos. She believes in 'planet-centric design' and is very keen on topics related to the intersection of people, planet, products and systems.
Liza Mathew
Liza is a hypnotherapist, life coach, and HR consultant. Over the last 25 years, she has been part of the corporate HR setup in the IT and Retail sectors, like Igate (today’s Capgemini), NESS, Stylus, and now consults for Lawrence and Mayo. Her passion to discover herself and live a life on purpose led her down the path of alternate medicine two decades ago.
Devi Mani
Devi started Skooc, a health-tech company focused on the well-being of children and parents. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she was the head of Total Rewards, Mergers, Acquisitions, Divestitures and Offshoring for Asia-Pacific and Japan at HPE. Prior to that, she worked at Target Corp, IBM and GE for 23 years.
Nayantara Kamath
Nayantara comes with a background in psychology and over 6 years of experience in UX research working with companies like Atlassian, Flipkart, and Google. She particularly enjoys evangelizing the power of research via programs and training that help stakeholders connect better with their users.
Shivani Gupta
Shivani is the lead behavior architect at Fractal Dimension - the executive, cross-functional strategic unit at Fractal Analytics. She works at the intersection of data, engineering, design & behavioral science for a diverse set of international clients. Shivani previously worked at Studio 5B - Dr. Reddy's, an award-winning design and innovation lab.
Divya Viswanathan
Divya, a design researcher and systems designer, runs a design practice called Tropic. For over 18 years, she has advocated for people (and planet) centered solutions to the world's biggest problems. Previously, she led projects and teams at IDEO, working with education, healthcare, financial inclusion and government organizations across the world.
Akshay Verma
Akshay runs the product innovation consultancy, Prophecy - a cooperative that helps companies discover, create and improve products and services. He enjoys partnering closely with founders to help accelerate early-stage product discovery through rapid experimentation, experience prototyping, field research and business model innovation.
Devika Ganapathy
Devika spent the first half of her 22-year career working as a researcher at Yahoo, Infosys and HFI. In 2011, she founded a micro-research consultancy, Anagram Research and currently leads collaborative and quality-focused research consultation and training. She endeavors to raise the bar for user research in India to build and strengthen the Indian research community.
Dharmesh Ba
Dharmesh Ba is a passionate behavioral researcher who uncovers insights for building digital products in India. With extensive experience in data analysis, interviews, surveys, and fieldwork, he empowers startups to grow their digital experiences. He founded 1990 Research Labs - a boutique user research firm in Bangalore.
Shipra Bhutada
Shipra is the founder and director of User Research at User Connect Consultancy (UCC), where she collaborates with clients on projects that impact design, products and business decisions. She founded SAGE – a platform to bolster the role of user research in business and product development and raise awareness about user research in India.
Ann Hintzman
Ann is the chief design officer at Fractal leading a team of 75+ designers, researchers and behavioral architects. As someone who aspires to create new futures, she wants to help organizations redefine growth, beyond market size, to include human, community and environmental impact.
Shaon Sengupta
Shaon heads the India design studio of Philips. She has won various design awards including 2 Red Dots and 4 iF, and the ‘Next Generation Women Leader’ title by Zinnov in 2022 - a pan India award that celebrates the Titans of Tech. She has published 9 international research papers in conferences like CHI and Service Design and Innovation.
Ruchi Batra
An experience designer and strategist, a researcher, a dreamer, a mother of twin boys, a home-maker, a food lover, an avid reader, and an aspiring author - Ruchi is also the Chief Design Officer at IBM iX. She enjoys immersing herself in multiple disciplines and topics to concoct new ideas for next-generation businesses, products, services, and user experiences.
