Shruti is an interaction designer and design researcher. She is Head of Design at Zalando leading a team called 'The Studio' which focuses on future-facing strategic work. Most recently, she led the product design & user research team at N26 in Berlin. Prior to that, she's worked in strategic design consulting with IDEO, design for the development sector, user experience for Nokia, and a few other places.
It's the complex systemic challenges that Shruti finds exciting. She's curious about organisational design, and how we might create nourishing working environments that help us do our best work. And of course, she's always trying to learn more and explore how we can bring diverse people and perspectives into the design process.
If you'd like to hear more about her approach to design, check out her talk 'Design it wrong' at the UXR Conference in 2019 about how designing for research is different, or her interview with Alex & Christian from the Product Bakery podcast about the role of design & research ops and building a healthy impactful design team.
Past Talks
20 May 2021
Is there a formula to ensure an efficient team? Is there a way where you can ensure teams are motivated, efficient and continue to ship great products?
In this interactive session, our speakers will talk through best practices that have worked for their businesses when building great and happy teams.
Learn what Matti, Claire and Julia have put into practice as they touch on:
- How to make the best of T-Shaped skills
- Building teams in the right way, from performance to upskilling
- Is there an ideal team makeup? Does one size fit all or how to know what's right for you?
19 May 2021
Sharing her own experience from being on-boarded remotely to now growing a remote global design team, Shruti will talk through her best practices in empowering new team members.
She will touch on how she's intertwined cultural and process changes within her team to ensure great remote experiences as her team continues to ship successful products.
28 April 2020
User Research helps avoid the biggest risk in product development – building the wrong thing. How can you ensure that you always have your finger on the pulse of evolving customer needs and attitudes?
In this talk, Shruti will share some tools and techniques to enable this continuous learning. It will help you break out of cookie-cutter research methods and apply creativity to how you explore and validate solutions with people.