Paul Svoboda is Director & Head of UX Strategy & Design at EMD Digital, an affiliate of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, where he leads multidisciplinary teams of designers, researchers, and software developers to create digital products that accelerate scientific work and drive meaningful business value.
Before joining EMD Digital, Paul spent years in both startup and agency environments, building products from the ground up and delivering digital experiences for major brands. This mix of entrepreneurial speed and design-driven rigor shapes his approach to product development today.
At Merck, Paul established the Liquid Design ecosystem and introduced new ways of working that help teams move faster, collaborate more effectively, and stay anchored in real user needs. He focuses on managing the intersections of UX research, business strategy, digital product design, and technology to enable cross-functional teams to build impactful products with confidence and clarity.
Upcoming Talks
13 May 2026
Most enterprise transformations stall in meetings. At EMD Digital, change is shipped as digital products. Instead of convincing teams to work differently, we create software, workflows, and libraries that make change an inevitable choice. With AI, these tools become adaptive systems that guide, learn, and scale faster than top-down plans. In this session, Paul Svoboda shows how a product-first, AI-accelerated approach makes transformation tangible, repeatable, and self-sustaining.
Key learnings:
- Lead transformation through products, not presentations
- Use AI to amplify adoption and learning
- Build tools that make change self-reinforcing
- Replace alignment meetings with systems that do the teaching