Stephen Gay

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” – Henry Ford

I believe leaders need to be willing to risk failure to get the benefit of learning.  Below is a personal mission and a list of three principles and various capabilities strengthened with 16 years of experience.

Mission & Vision

Driven to inspire & reinvent. Focused on transforming a business’s most ambiguous problems into desirable, durable products and services through innovative and strategic design.

Resume & Sample Projects
Explore My Workshops and Talks

Principles & Expertise

Successful product designs require strong leadership and collaboration across disciplines and organization levels.

  • Team leadership – design management and mentoring for designers
  • Context and customer analysis – defining customer profiles and scenarios
  • Problem definition – defining the customer problem and defining testable hypotheses
  • Design planning – defining roadmaps, requirements and feature prioritization
  • Design evangelism – educating and promoting design thinking and best practices

Crafting delightful solutions for complex problems requires knowledge of methodologies as well as industry standards and evolving technologies.

  • Innovation catalyzing – promoting innovation with a variety of frameworks
  • Facilitation – seeing and bringing a team together around the big picture
  • Workshop planning – creating collaborative moments in product development
  • Organizational models & task flows – defining optimized flows for first use and on-going usage
  • Information Architecture – organizing product structure to optimize for a cross platform experiences
  • Interaction Design – delightful interaction design for both web and mobile

Informing and measuring the success of a design with customer insight identifies wins, obstacles, and opportunities.

  • Field research – fostering deep customer empathy to drive passion and vision
  • Agile processes – iterative research and design, collaborating with engineers, marketers and designers
  • Rapid prototyping – developing low- to high-fidelity prototypes for rapid experimentation
  • Usability testing – in-person, remote or un-moderated exploration using a variety of methods