design thinking story
Nicole Dessain
Why Talent Tales?
Why Talent Tales?

Going Hybrid – A Conversation with Snyk’s Diana Marchese

Going Hybrid – A Conversation with Snyk’s Diana Marchese

In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Diana Marchese, the Director of People Experience at Snyk.

Diana’s superpower is taking ambiguous ideas, clarify them, and then turn them into tangible results.

Diana shares that she entered the design thinking world as an art teacher. She feels as though she organically applied a design thinking mindset when collaborating with her students and thinking holistically about the experience of the student. In 2015, Diana pivoted her career and moved into the field of workplace experience. She realized that students and adults have the same needs and wants: to be heard, to feel safe, and to have an impact.

Diana joined her current company, Snyk, in January of 2020 - right before the pandemic hit. She spent her onboarding months helping to transition the company to a virtual organization.

Scaling Capability – A Conversation with IBM’s Damon Deaner

Scaling Capability – A Conversation with IBM’s Damon Deaner

In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Damon Deaner, the Director of Employee Experience & Design at IBM.

Damon’s superpower is blending design and technology. He now applies his superpower by using design and tech to enable people experience.

Damon started his journey in design thinking in 2012 when IBM announced that they would bring design back and build a culture of design thinking. Damon joined the newly formed design organization and helped bring developers, engineers, and designers together to use design thinking. From there, he ended up leading all design talent at IBM and conducted several employee lifecycle projects. That caught the attention of the CHRO and eventually Damon was asked to join the HR team to build an employee experience practice.

Acting Agile – A Conversation with Dr. Oetker’s Maike Kueper

Acting Agile – A Conversation with Dr. Oetker’s Maike Kueper

In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Maike Kueper, an Agile Culture Development Coach at Dr. Oetker.

Maike’s superpower is curating evidence-based HR approaches which in her mind provide a better way of designing HR programs and processes rather than using a “we’ve always done it this way” approach. An example she shares is how there is research that supports the fact that if performance management only focuses on using extrinsic motivators it can discourage those employees who are mainly motivated intrinsically.

Maike has a humanities background which affords her with a unique point of view around culture and organizational development in her role as Agile coach.

Maike’s focus is on fostering a human-centered and agile mindset at Dr. Oetker rather than just following rigid methods. One way that manifests is in a relentless focus on defining the problem space well before jumping to solutions and iterating small experiments.

Navigating Through Crisis – A Conversation with UChicago Medicine’s Tyler Carroll

Navigating Through Crisis – A Conversation with UChicago Medicine’s Tyler Carroll

In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Tyler Carroll, Executive Director of Organizational Climate at UChicago Medicine.

Tyler’s current superpower is (or at least she aspires to it) to stay awake for 24 hours to get everything done that needs to be completed – both a work and at home. BAM! I think many of us wish they had that superpower right about now…

Tyler’s career story is marked by progressing in the field of change management across various functions and organizations. She joined UChicago Medicine six years ago leading a team that is responsible for making this purpose-driven healthcare organization an even better place to work.

Tyler was first exposed to human-centered design when she realized that HR communications were very functional and not so much crafted with the user in mind. She realized that the greatest HR programs can be ineffective if the message is lost because it was not tied to the employees’ experiences.

Blueprinting Service – A Conversation with Intel’s Shira Ben Cohen

Blueprinting Service – A Conversation with Intel’s Shira Ben Cohen

In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Shira Ben Cohen, Global Experience Designer at Intel.

Shira’s creative superpower is service blueprinting. A service blueprint is a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Shira is not only spearheading experience design at Intel, she also writes and speaks about it externally and has built a local community of service designers in Tel Aviv.