Partner Booths at DL Summit 2022

In November, I had the opportunity to share my PUMA journey in Design Systems and DesignOps with the wonderful folks at Digitale Leute Summit in Cologne, DE. Digitale Leute Summit is an annual conference at the intersection of Tech, User Experience, and Product. The Summit brought speakers from those verticals to share their insights with a community of 1,000 attendees.

My session was titled “Change Management at PUMA, Through the Eyes of a Designer,” and that designer was me. During the 30-minute talk, I spoke about the digital transformation challenges we’ve encountered at PUMA and how we’ve brought people along on that journey. One area that I had some great feedback around was bringing forward my previous career in Education and the cultural learnings I’ve gathered while living abroad.

After the talk, I had some great conversations with designers, researchers, and other technology folks, where a common thread began to appear. It didn’t matter the organization’s size or how many designers and engineers were working on a product; teams were experiencing similar challenges across all spaces.

Change management is hard work; it’s the unseen work that is the glue holding things together.