Billie Mandel

Billie is a design geek, a design strategy geek, and a design management geek, with over fifteen years leading teams of software creatives -- UX designers, researchers, content people, product people, front-end developers -- the folks who figure out what to build, why, and how to make it amazing. Although she's been in leadership for a long time, she has also run her own consulting business, and has undying love for tackling a meaty design problem on her own, as a design lead on a cross-functional team.

Billie has social science degrees from Stanford and Berkeley that she uses in her professional life more often than anyone would ever guess. Her portfolio, however, is shockingly thin on web sites; most of her career design work has been in enterprise and mobile software. She was designing next-generation user experiences for what passed for cutting edge mobile devices at the time, when the iPhone came out and stole her thunder.

The design problems that excite Billie most are at the intersection of business, product strategy, and cross-device design, with a little bit of social software and game design theory thrown in for that end-user viral/stickiness factor. Her latest crusade within the industry is to demonstrate the value of getting more people to show up at work with their full selves.