// customer-first by design
Product Design, UX & Operations Leader | Transforming organizations towards customer-centricity | Former Global Lead Design Ops PayPal
HI. I’M TALKE
and I love solving hard problems people-first. I believe that putting people at the center of every experience is vital for your company culture, customer experience and bottom line.
From working in Digital agencies in London, to building products at PayPal in EMEA and globally for 11+ years, I had the privilege to work across the entire PayPal product portfolio and across multiple industries and disciplines. One of my proudest moments was building the first European credit solutions for PayPal—from revolving lines in the UK to instalments and pay in 3 in Europe, including integrating credit into Apple checkout.
As 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 - I focused on the integration of startups into the global corporation, helping the M&A process, while retaining the innovation and lean startup work practices.
I am currently a solopreneur and business consultant. I facilitate design sprints, take on (interim) leadership roles for pilot teams, facilitate discovery work and coach new design leaders - 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗯𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻.
As a systems thinker and connector, I’m walking between the worlds of full-time roles in global corporations and being a solopreneur, coach and consultant. I care more about the challenge and doing work that matters, than a specific title or set-up.
where I focus
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Design thinking and in particular design sprints drastically reduce the work that usually takes between 3-4 months to around 1 week, allowing teams to quickly prototype solutions while validating concepts with customers and stakeholders.
These can lead to products or solutions, the key is to co-create and connect, while moving fast and exploring options that can be validated with real end-users before investing further. -
Supporting you and your teams with ways of working that make your work more impactful and efficient.
Both inside your org and in connection to the wider organisation - from Product through to Growth and Sales.I specialize and have a lot of experience in working with globally dispersed teams, and enabling team work built on trust that gets teams into working on the right things effectively.
Focusing on streamlining the Product development lifecycle as well as the employee journey.
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Problem framing, discovery workshops, or requirements gathering.
Getting the problem right before figuring out how to solve it is key in product development. Setting that initial framing up correctly helps you save lots of money and time, because you’re aligned as a team and have defined the goals clearly.
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Visualizing customer journeys or the complexity of your product portfolio across teams is an incredibly powerful exercise that helps you focus. It makes teams understand issues better, gets stakeholders to align and creates a bias towards action.
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The hard problem to tackle and the real business value of design - getting customer-first thinking embedded across the business and not just in the product.
Spreading design thinking and activities across different departments and aligning teams arounds customer needs and e.g. “jobs to be done”.
If you’re ready to walk this path - from the top down and want to transform into a customer-first company - I’m here to help.
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As most things in life creating truly effective design organizations is a two-way street.
It’s about teaching the business to understand design, and teaching designers how to speak and understand the business.
The most successful and strategic designers know how to influence their stakeholders, because they can establish trust relationships and know how to talk revenue, metrics and outcomes.
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Working with your Design leaders through structured coaching and sparring. So your Design organization becomes a strategic business partner and helps you sustain long-term growth.
Help your design leaders
Improve cross-functional Leadership
Scale & improve ways of working
Increase resilience & personal growth
Build out strategic foresight and continuously raise the bar
Speak the language of business & handle office politics
Trusted by companies across industries. Working globally, regionally and locally.
“Talke has kicked off a mindset shift in our team, putting the experience of our employees as a starting point, not an afterthought. Her engaging and easy to follow moderation style and template design has enabled us to embed different ways of working”
WINNING BY BEING CUSTOMER-OBSESSEDCREATING CUSTOMER-OBSESSED ORGANIZATIONs
It’s a hard problem to tackle - getting whole organizations to think and act customer-first instead of reflecting their own organizational structure and hierarchies in every single process and interaction. It’s a problem I’ve been obsessed with ever since researching the usability of the European Union website for my PhD.
Turns out - there’s no magic bullet. But this is the hard problem to solve, the one that effects your whole business and the one that shows the business value of design.
In the aptly titled Business Value of Design, by McKinsey & Company the authors point out that the value of design comes from four different dimensions.
More than a feeling - it’s analytical leadership
More than a department - it’s cross-functional talent
More than a phase - it’s continuous iteration
More than a product - it’s user experience
That’s hard and not a “low-hanging fruit” as they like to say.
But it’s one of the those complex problems worth solving - because it will effect everything else. If you can make your business understand design and customers, while making your designers speak metrics and revenue - that’s how you build your differentiation.
If you need support with this and want to move towards more design thinking, collaboration and shared sense making - that’s where I play.
Preparing for a Design Sprint
One of the best ways to use that 1 week of a design sprints as efficiently as possible - is by preparing well and running a problem framing workshop in advance.
This helps to -
Get a clear understanding of priorities between different departments
Establish the known knowns and the known unknowns
Define the boundaries of the problem space and align teams around the same purpose
This prep work helps to then solve the right problem during the design sprint, and not just “solve the problem right”. And whether remote or on-site this is the part that proves being prepared makes the joint working part so much more productive and focused.