Laura Dantonio is a Principal Product Designer (UX) at Wood Mackenzie, specializing in Product Strategy, Research & Analytics, and Strategic Planning. With a strong background in UX leadership, she has shaped user experiences across publishing, telecom, finance, and social media start-ups.
Previously, Laura was a UX Lead Designer at Elsevier, where she played a key role in designing research-driven solutions for the academic publishing industry.
With over a decade of experience driving UX impact in cross-functional teams, Laura focuses on aligning design efforts with business objectives.
She is passionate about helping teams bridge the gap between UX, product, and engineering to create meaningful, user-cantered outcomes.
Upcoming Talks
20 May 2025
OKRs promise alignment, focus, and measurable impact—but for many teams, they can feel like an imposed structure that limits autonomy. How do you craft OKRs that serve both business goals and team needs without creating unnecessary bureaucracy?
In this interactive forum, Laura and Raif will facilitate a candid discussion on the challenges teams face when implementing OKRs. This is a highly participatory session where attendees can share experiences, ask questions, and debate:
- When do OKRs work, and when do they hinder creativity?
- How can UX teams balance strategic alignment with bottom-up innovation?
- Common pitfalls in OKR adoption and how to avoid them
- How to get buy-in from teams who see OKRs as a top-down mandate
Whether you're struggling with OKR adoption or looking to refine your approach or just talk through it, this session will give you real-world insights from peers and experienced practitioners.
21 May 2025
Are you struggling to align your UX team's efforts with broader business goals? Many UX and product teams face challenges aligning their work with company objectives, leading to fragmented focus, unclear priorities, and reduced impact.
In this interactive workshop, you'll learn how to craft meaningful OKRs that drive focus and collaboration across UX, product, and development teams. Through real-world case studies and practical exercises, you’ll leave with the tools to apply OKRs in your own work, ensuring your team's design efforts contribute directly to strategic outcomes.
Drawing from over 10 years of experience implementing OKRs, Laura and Raif will demonstrate how this framework fosters alignment, focus, and measurable progress across cross-functional teams.
- Overview of OKRs, their origins, and relevance to UX teams
- Real-world examples of OKR implementation in UX, focusing on how they improved alignment and outcomes
- Hands-on group exercises—participants will develop OKRs based on scenarios or their own team challenges, with guided feedback
- Group reflection—sharing insights, discussing challenges, and addressing participant questions to solidify understanding
Past Talks
In this talk, I'm going to present a series of visual maps used to foster cross-discipline collaboration and team alignment in an enterprise search redesign. Search is a complex experience that requires a highly technical team and cross-discipline collaboration. For this project, I created a search framework to understand users' pain points in a visual map to guide design/development and foster collaboration. We used this framework to redesign search experiences and found it useful to prioritise search features and support collaboration. Participants will learn why using visual maps is useful for team collaboration and they will be inspired to create maps with practical examples.