Coaches Training Institute (CTI)

CAPT - Center for Applications of Psychological Type

Babson College - Franklin W. Olin Graduate School of Business

Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Design & Research Executive  -  Experience & Ecosystem Design  -  FRSA

San Francisco, California, United States

I partner with entrepreneurial leaders to: (1) Uncover latent customer needs and transform novel insights into products, services and experiences that drive breakthrough customer and business outcomes. (2) Co-create and communicate compelling North Star visions that guide decisions and activate individuals and teams. (3) Define meaningful metrics to measure progress. (4) Incorporate human-centered design into core processes to increase employee engagement and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

I've coached over 500 founders, entrepreneurs and venture teams develop solutions customers love and bring them to market.

FOCUS AREAS
-  Deep listening to understand stakeholder behaviors, motivations, pains and fears
-  Framing business problems/opportunities using human-centered innovation practices
-  Transforming stakeholder insights into design criteria to guide product development
-  Co-creating/communicating North Star vision and designing the end-to-end experience
-  Prototyping and testing to learn what works in real-world contexts
-  Co-designing employee experience to support the desired customer experience

WHAT I BRING
Cross-industry customer-led research and development experience, strategic storytelling, futures thinking, systems thinking, behavior design, critical thinking, assumption/bias identification, business model (re)design, experience design (XD) / customer experience (CX), entrepreneurial mindset, curiosity, empathy, persistence, resilience, grit and a "get it done" attitude

SPECIAL INTERESTS
Entrepreneurial ecosystem design / narrative design / worldbuilding / designing for equity / human-AI collaboration / transformative technologies / the future of work / ecosystem thinking / platforms to support public imagination and co-creation

Specialties: design thinking facilitation, adaptive teams, behavior design, social innovation, stakeholder co-creation, future design

Innovation is Social, LLC

Principal  -  Research, Experience Design, Product Innovation & Development

Cordial World is building a Web3 space for consensus-building through the sharing of perspectives and lived experience.

Cordial World Foundation

Advisor: Product and Experience Strategy

The RSA is a think tank "committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges." With a global network of 30,000+ Fellows, this community of proactive problem solvers carries out cutting-edge research and builds "networks and opportunities for people to collaborate, influence and demonstrate practical solutions to realize change" for a better collective future.

- Founded in 1754 in London by social reformer and inventor William Shipley, who believed individuals can help to shape a culture that serves the public interest. Since then notable RSA Fellows have included Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Marie Curie, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, Nelson Mandela and Stephen Hawking."

The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce)

Fellow

Led the Experience Design practice at ZS, where we worked side-by-side with senior business leaders to tackle complex system, business and social challenges in healthcare, financial services, and other industries.

By combining deep dive research, co-creation, simulation, and immersive experiences with advanced analytics and behavioral insights, we arrived at a shared understanding of what drives human behavior. The resulting novel insights fueled exponential growth and differentiation via new products, programs, services and experiences. To ensure solutions work in clients' real-world contexts, employee experience and transformation strategy were designed into every engagement.

Developed and introduced an embedded coaching program to scale human-centered innovation and unstructured problem-solving capabilities across the business consulting organization.

Associate Partner / Experience Design Director

Experience Design & Business Strategy Consulting

Coached 80+ women entrepreneurs on problem/solution fit, product/market fit as they brought successful innovations to market.

The CWEL Women Innovating Now (WIN) Lab is an innovative, year-long residency program for women entrepreneurs who are thinking big, acting boldly and launching thriving companies. The WIN Lab provides entrepreneurs with the road map, expertise, inspiration and community needed to launch successful ventures.

Babson College

Executive-in-Residence

- Served as strategic partner to senior leaders in Product Management, HR, Legal, and Finance
- Facilitated dozens of action-learning workshops for product managers / high potential leaders
- Developed team capacity for designing rapid experiments to test assumptions about customer needs and market opportunities.
- Coached teams as they transformed insights into tangible product and market results
- Provided follow-on coaching to bring "lean startup," business model innovation and design thinking principles into the DNA at Intuit

Intuit

Chief Innovation Catalyst, Design Thinking Practice  -  Design Innovation Group

Focused on engineering the people side of change across the Global Ecosystem and Partner Group. Engaged hearts and minds by defining and communicating the strategy and road map for social business collaboration and knowledge acceleration.  Consulted to internal stakeholders, providing coaching, best practices and strategies for building and nurturing a community focused on social business innovation.

Led design and development of mobile social business solutions to connect customers, partners and employees, made knowledge and insight contagious through storytelling/film, and worked with customers to identify new opportunities for product and service innovation.

Director, Social Business Innovation, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group

Current and Past Roles:
Lecturer for CS447 / ME325 "Software Design Experiences," where interdisciplinary student teams apply design thinking and person-centered methodologies to real-world problems sponsored by partner companies and non-profit organizations.

HPI School of Design Thinking (HPI D-School), Potsdam - Program design, launch, and facilitation including the design of the student and professor experience

Coach:
-  d.school Executive Bootcamp
-  ME310 "Design Innovation," a 9-month program with global technical universities
-  DESINST 245 "Redesigning Post-Disaster Finance"  -  Speculative design in finance
-  CS379L POLISCI 337T LAW498 "Designing Liberation Technologies"​ Applying design thinking to address social challenges, in partnership with the University of Nairobi.

Participating clients for these programs include: Kaiser Permanente, LinkedIn, the City of Palo Alto, Audi, Volkswagen of America, JetBlue and Pioneer.

Stanford University

Lecturer and Coach: Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school)

I was the first external Design hire for Hasso Plattner new Design Services Team, a multi-disciplinary group in the Office of the CEO. The mission of this new organization was to accelerate the adoption of Design Thinking at SAP and return to the human-centered focus of its original founders.

Innovation & Project Leader / Design Research leader / Experience Strategist / PM Coach:
Led customer research and strategy to develop the four-year vision of the sustainability and HCM suites.

Regularly partnered with internal clients to deliver new concepts, business models, products and services using facilitated workshops and design thinking methodologies including design research, systems thinking, storytelling, and rapid prototyping. Led design research and developed training and development programming for more junior researchers.

Developed and ran the Global Design-led Coaching Practice, a project-based action-learning program to develop Senior Product Leaders as Innovation leaders and scaling design research and innovation best practices across SAP.

Authored "The Design-Led Innovation Field Guide,” 170-page How-to guide for coaching intrapreneurs and agile teams.

Co-developed "Harmony"​ an enterprise social network platform to surface best-fit talent for projects based on expertise, interests, passions, hobbies and colleague "metadata"​ -- things the individual does effortlessly and wouldn't think to put on their LinkedIn profile.

Designed, delivered and ran global Design Thinking Bootcamps to train SAP and external executives in China, the U.S., and the D-School at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany.

Innovation Leader / Coach, Design Services Team, Office of the CEO - CTO

Led a team of interaction designers, researchers and usability engineers in defining user experience strategy and design for new and existing Human Capital Management and Higher Education product lines.

Facilitated the adoption of user-centered processes by product strategy and support organizations.

Coordinated organization-wide user experience initiatives.

PeopleSoft

Manager, User Experience - HR, Recruiting and Education Products

Provided customer experience and product strategy consulting to start-up founders and business leaders at Accolo, Razorfish, <a href="http://Waiter.com">Waiter.com</a> and Mobius Venture Capital.

InterPlay Arts

Founder, Creative Catalyst

Developed a product vision and led development of customer requirements, experience and user interface for Enviz, a new SaaS behavioral tracking and analysis service.

Collaborated with clients to develop and run research experiments to identify areas for digital experience improvements for consumer and B2B properties. Also led and managed experience and visual design teams.

Enviz was acquired by Keynote Systems Inc. in 2002. This product is now known as Dynatrace.

Enviz (now Keynote Dynatrace)

Director of Digital Experience Design / Director of Product Marketing

Led user experience team in creating a unified customer experience across e-commerce, community and productivity tool areas.

Cultivated and grew a highly-engaged community of Office Managers and Administrative Assistants through a combination of online and offline events and discussions. Engaged community in defining a new e-commerce service; used ethnographic studies to understand the impact of proposed services on existing work processes.

OfficeClick (now Vendavo)

Director, User Experience / Community Manager

- Led an interdisciplinary team of designers, producers and customer experience professionals.
-  Responsible for customer insights and guiding consumer experience and enterprise product design.
-  Led executive briefings to share findings and focus development on areas of greatest impact.

PointCast, Inc.

Manager, Usability and Web Production

Developed product strategy and user experience for Lotus 1-2-3 and Approach product lines.

Led multidisciplinary team responsible for product, suite and design strategy (1-2-3, Lotus Suite and Lotus Approach divisions).

Erin Liman