Katie Silvers is the Director of Design and UX at Salesforce and is an expert in aligning business needs and communication with core leadership. Before joining Salesforce, Katie was a manager of Corporate Strategy and Innovation at the Arielle X Group and LexisNexis. She specializes in Design Thinking tools and Agile methodologies and believes product and process innovation is an indispensable element in business growth. Katie leads an international design and research team responsible for creating productivity and efficiency tools for the internal sales organization.

This week on the Optimistic Design podcast, Katie joins us to give her perspective on the role of design lead innovation in technology as an industry as a whole. She shares the non-tradition route she took into the design world and how her current role at Salesforce works to drive collaboration between designers and developers. We also dig into Katie’s actionable advice for other leaders scaling design and innovation teams in large organizations, particularly in today’s economic climate.