Paul Svoboda
Paul Svoboda — Director & Head of User Experience Strategy and Design / Product Manager at EMD Digital. Talks and sessions delivered at UXDX.
Director & Head of User Experience Strategy and Design / Product Manager
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 building AI-native products for regulated scientific environments. His current work spans Liquid Images — an AI image generator deployed across Merck — and the next generation of agentic systems that accelerate scientific workflows and drive meaningful business value.
Before joining EMD Digital, Paul shaped connected-vehicle experiences at Razorfish and helped build COBI, the smart-bike startup acquired by Bosch. This mix of entrepreneurial speed and design-driven rigor shapes his approach to product development today. At Merck, he 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 the intersection of UX, AI, and regulated science — a space where speed, rigor, and trust all have to hold at once.
Past talks
2 talks · 1 eventQ&A Deep Dive: Making Change Stick in UX Leadership and Product Transformation
Transformation fails when new ways of working never make it into day-to-day behavior. In this Q&A deep dive, Ben Hewett and Paul Svoboda will help you explore what it really takes to make change stick, with plenty of space for you to ask direct questions and dig into the practical realities behind lasting transformation. Ben will share the leadership perspective on growing and repositioning UX for greater influence, showing how teams can earn trust, prove value, and move from service providers to embedded product partners. Paul will bring a product-led transformation lens, showing how change can happen faster when it is built into tools, workflows, and adaptive systems instead of being talked about in endless meetings. Together, they will unpack how you can move beyond alignment theater and create structures, behaviors, and systems that lead to better decisions, stronger collaboration, and lasting business impact. Come ready to raise the challenges you are facing in your own organization and get into the detail of what actually works.
Stop the Meetings, Start Building: Product-Led Transformation
Most enterprise transformations stall in meetings. At EMD Digital, change is shipped as software. Workflow platforms and creative automation make better practices the default, so teams adopt new ways of working through use. 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