The boilerplate:
An entrepreneurial Product and Experience Design Leader with a decade of work experience across enterprise software products, startups, and the development sector. He brings a growth mindset, can-do attitude, and passion for solving complex challenges. Uzair has established and scaled practices for product and experience design and led several high impact, and large scale strategic engagements for transforming products, services, and experiences impacting the lives of millions of users.
Uzair is formally trained in Product and Systems design from Cornell University (USA) and also a graduate of Founder Institute (Silicon Valley-based accelerator).
– Product Strategy & Innovation
– Experience Design Strategy
– Service Design and UX Research
– Design & Product Leadership
The real me:
One word people use to describe me is ‘persistent’. I feel very passionate about creating an impact and accelerating outcomes for the teams and organizations I work with. ‘Inside the box’ is not my DNA, I always challenge the status quo to find better solutions, better ways of working and bringing a change for better. Throughout my journey, I’ve rocked the boat whenever I got comfortable in my role. Breaking the box and embracing new challenges is a way for accelerated learning.
I believe in ‘fail fast to learn fast’: two failed startup ventures contributed significantly towards making my third one a success. All the learnings from startup, business development, scaling teams and staring at complex problem spaces bring me the spark to push the boundaries. At the same time, I’ve worked 5 years of my career solving enterprise challenges which gives me a strong sense of perspective and knowledge of inner mechanics of ‘large ships’.
If your’e looking for people with passion, perseverance, hustle and audacity to stare in the face of big challenges and make an attempt at solving them: your’e at talking to the right person.
What People Say About Me?
Very good at not only making decisions, but involving the right people and communicating very clearly the rationale behind the decision-making.
Peer review 2019
He is not only open to new ideas, but also encourages the entire team to takes theses ideas into action.
360′ Feedback from direct reports
Off the charts on achievement and motivation!
Senior Leadership Feedback
Areas of Expertise
01
Service Design
Mapping and improving existing services and experiences, front/middle stage processes & interactions, user-research and insights, understanding and incorporating behaviour-change tactics and methods and establishing experience metrics to quantify improvements in customer experience. Have led Service Design projects for large scale government program with overall budget of $1B
02
User Experience Research
Design Research, research methodology, research execution + synthesis, insights generation, presentation and communication with key stakeholders through storytelling are my core areas of strength. I’ve led several Design research engagements for existing and Greenfield products and services. Storytelling and insight creation is consistently appreciated by stakeholders
03
Digital Product Management
Led several digital product teams from concept to launch through the journey of user-research, stakeholder alignment, business case development, roadmap creation, feature-set exploration, innovation sprints all the way to MVP and value proposition definition, customer validation, and phased rollout plans. Examples include mobile and web applications for the telecom and BFSI sector, AgTech, Healthcare and digital media products.
04
Imagining a better future
Speculating future scenarios for organization’s industry leadership, new business models for growth based on detailed assessments of early technology and consumer behaviour trends and previous precedents. Executive storytelling using data, concepts and use-cases. Examples include Future of Telecom in the 5G era, Future of Banks in Machine-to-Machine Economy, Future of Architecture Firms.
05
Design Leadership
I’ve setup several multi-disciplinary design teams, design practice & frameworks, led user experience research design & execution for service design as well as digital design. In my current role, I’ve helped scale Design Thinking practices across the organization training 60 people in Design Thinking basics and coaching 4x teams in implementing Design Thinking to solve challenges related to sales, marketing, HR within the company (using IBM toolkit).
06
Design Thinking
Design Facilitation is one of my core strengths and I’ve led several high impact Design Thinking engagements for organizations like Nestle, Philip Morris, Telenor, GSM Alliance, Bell Canada, Rogers and others. These engagements covered full-cycle from hypothesis creation to prototype validation with real users and MVP product and experience roadmaps and involved sponsoring C-Level stakeholders.
07
Entrepreneur-in-residence
As a startup veteran, with two failed startups and one successful bootstrapped startup, I’ve hands-on experience with entrepreneurship. I help startups establish customer-problem fit and support their growth towards problem-solution fit. I’ve spearheaded innovation programs for companies to create idea funnel, incubate and scale new products. In my recent role, the incubator yielded several open source plugins and a design-systems accelerator kit
08
Connected Things (IoT)
I’ve designed and developed commercial grade smart building solutions and led product teams to manage product lifecycle from connect to 6th year of enhancements. Have consulted with multiple IoT startups in Agri-Tech startups in product discovery, customer development, product launch and go to market plans. AgriTech company (Cowlar) is a Y-Combinator graduate.
Industry Areas
Startups Digital Banking Telecom Enterprise Software Innovation Digital Mortgage
Healthcare AgriTech IoT Connected Buildings
Financial Inclusion Next Billion Users Decker Home Entertainment Digital Payments
Uzairsukhera 