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01 Design Leader

In 2013, Janaki helped create the Design and Co-Innovation Center, a strategic design agency within SAP. She recruited, coached and inspired talented interaction designers, visual designers, design thinkers, technology and business experts to deliver products and services to customers that transformed the way they worked. She led teams that won multiple product design awards including the Gold award for Best Enterprise Experience, several Red Dot awards, IDEA award, Fast Company Innovation by design award, to name a few. Janaki was named a Women of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal in 2016.

I'M

Janaki Kumar.

Design leader |
Innovation culture catalyst | Speaker | Author | Artist

Janaki is a thought-leader in design-led innovation for the enterprise. She is committed to delivering award-winning products and services that help businesses transform the way they work. She is a proven leader in building, coaching and inspiring high-performance design teams, leveraging design-thinking, customer empathy, and co-innovation.

02 Innovation Culture Catalyst

Janaki is a passionate advocate for creating a culture of innovation in organizations that harness the creative potentials of all employees.  She has helped create a framework to evaluate which stage an organization is today, and how to get to the next stage.

03 sPEAKER & TEACHER

Janaki is a frequent speaker and educator on the topics of design, leadership, innovation, culture, and diversity. She is a speaker at various conferences including TEDx on Gamification at Work and IxDA Florianopolis on Riding the wave of digital disruption by design. She is a co-instructor of the LEAD course on Customer Experience Design, a Neuroscience Perspective in the Sanford Graduate School of Business.

04 AUTHOR

05 Experience

2018 - Present

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

MD, Head of Design, Commercial Bank

Established a Design Center of Excellence to support big data, fintech and proptech transformation initiatives across the Commercial Bank

 

Built a team of researchers, service designers and product designers to partner with business stakeholders from concept to design execution, for both internal and client facing products

Codified a design system to provide a coherent and delightful experience across all digital touch points


Sparked a culture of creativity and innovation and contributed to the diversity and inclusion efforts in the organization

Led a design project to understand the financial needs of the underbanked and unbanked renters and the landlords who house them

2001-2018 (17Y)

SAP

VP, Design Evangelist, Office of the Chief Design Officer

Extend SAP’s thought leadership in design and Innovation

Nurture the design community in Silicon Valley

Lead strategic projects on behalf of the CDO

 

VP, Head of Design and Co-Innovation Center, Americas

Established SAP’s Design and Co-Innovation team, strategic design agency in Palo Alto.

Recruited and staffed a team of designers, researchers, and design thinking experts to work with customers on their strategic innovation projects.

Completed over 700 projects in less than five years with some of the most important companies in the world

 

Senior Director, UX Design USA 

Led a centralized team of designers for all lines of business based in Palo Alto including the Cloud Products, Sustainability Applications Group and the Global Business Incubator.

Established the Governance Risk & Compliance (GRC)  design team and shipped SAP’s GRC suite

Led the design of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Productivity Suite

Experienced in end-to-end enterprise suite of products

2015-Present (5Y)

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Co-Instructor

Customer Engagement Design: A Neuroscience Perspective,” a course with Dr. Baba Shiv at the Stanford GSB LEAD Certificate: Corporate Innovation

2000-2001 (1Y)

myCFO / Harris Financials

Interaction Designer, User Experience Group

1998-2000 (2Y)

SAP Labs

Internet Developer, Electronic Commerce

Created SAP’s first web based products. Collaborated with Frog Design, Cooper Interaction and Karen Holtzblatt to create best practices for design at SAP

1994-1998(4Y)

Fannie Mae (FNMA) Washington

Senior Software Engineer, Web Development Group 

Winner of the 1998 ComputerWorld Smithsonian Award

Designed screens, created prototype, conducted usability studies for a web-based financial application – MortgageLinks

1993-1994 (1Y)

eCredit.com/SR Research

1991-1993 (2Y)

Bank of Boston

06 EDUCATION

2011

Stanford University GSB

Executive Leadership Program

1991

Boston University

M.S. Management Information Systems

1989

Madurai Kamaraj University

M.Com Finance

1988

National Institute of Information Technology

Diploma Systems Management

CONTACT
CONTACT

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