Irene Au - Reflections on Executive Design Leadership

Irene Au shares some of the learnings from her stellar career, the early life experiences that have helped her to succeed, and the importance of sweating the right stuff.

Highlights include:

• What role does the C-Suite play in a company’s ability to realise good design?
• How did you navigate the strong points of view of founder executives?
• What did you see in the designers you’ve hired that wasn’t in those you didn’t?
• Why do design leaders need to carefully choose their stakeholders?
• Why do you wish the job title UX Designer would disappear?

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Who is Irene Au?

Irene is a Design Partner at Khosla Ventures where she works with early-, mid- and late-stage startup CEOs to help them realise the value of design through better methods, practices, processes, leadership and talent.

Irene has been one of Silicon Valley’s most successful design executives and has played an important role in shaping and elevating design within several influential technology companies.

She was the VP of Design at Udacity, where she helped the leadership team to find product-market fit and to define the company’s strategy, vision, mission, and values. Irene also led the design and research efforts for the company’s first product offering.

Irene was also the Director of User Experience (Global Head) at Google for nearly 6 years. During her time there, Irene scaled and led the design team to over 350 people and transformed the way the famously engineering-driven company valued and operationalised design.

Her success at Google was in part enabled by her prior experience as VP of User Experience at Yahoo!, where for four years she was the design leader responsible for the company’s user experience across all of its products and design infrastructure efforts.

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Find Irene here:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ireneau/
Medium: https://medium.com/@ireneau
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ireneau
Website: https://ireneau.com/

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