Design Better17 Jun 2025

Bonus Episode: Shani Sandy, VP, Experience Design at IBM, live in NYC for UserTesting's THiS Connect Tour

Maybe you’ve already heard, but we’re in the midst of significant global and technological change. It will be a struggle for many businesses to adapt, but IBM is a company that’s no stranger to change. Time and again, they’ve reimagined, restructured, and refactored their business to stay relevant. Our guest today, Shani Sandy, is playing an important role in IBM’s current transformation as VP of Experience Design. Welcome to a live episode of Design Better recorded at THiS Connect presented by UserTesting in New York. We’re talking with Shani today about how her team stays connected to users to design great products, design’s role in the new era of AI, and how IBM is evolving. *** Learn more about UserTesting *** Bio Shani Sandy is a visionary design executive whose ethos—DESIGNING FORWARD—reflects a career dedicated to propelling businesses, communities, and cultures through intentional, people-centered innovation. With a powerful blend of strategic leadership and creative insight, Shani has led transformative initiatives for Fortune 500 companies, including pioneering roles as the first Executive Creative Director at S&P Global and the first Design Executive at IBM Systems. Her expertise lies in integrating multidisciplinary design, AI, and emerging technologies to elevate user experiences, drive measurable business outcomes, and cultivate design maturity across organizations. Known for aligning design strategy with C-suite objectives, Shani excels at translating complexity into clarity and forging collaboration across functions to deliver lasting impact. She is a sought-after keynote speaker, having shared her insights at premier conferences including 3% Conference, AIGA National, and Adobe Creative Jam. A passionate mentor and advocate for underrepresented creatives, Shani is equally committed to shaping the future of design leadership as she is to delivering on today’s innovation. Whether guiding enterprise transformation or nurturing the next generation of designers, Shani leads with bold vision, strategic execution, and an unwavering focus on outcomes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Episoder(268)

Creative Leadership Retreat: Paul Dichter

This episode kicks off a special series recorded live at our Creative Leadership Retreat in Sonoma, which we co-hosted with our friends at September Works in late September. We gathered 40 leaders fro...

4 Nov 1h

Maurice Cherry: Revision Path creator on why attention isn’t impact

For eleven years, Maurice Cherry made a weekly podcast called Revision Path showcasing Black designers from around the world. He recorded more than 500 episodes with designers on six continents and bu...

28 Okt 51min

Tom Foley: How to pair typefaces and why the best brand fonts go unnoticed

Tom Foley didn’t set out to design typefaces. As a postgraduate student at Central Saint Martins in London, he was researching why Ireland, unlike Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Germany, never seeme...

21 Okt 40min

Kevin Flores: Find Your Inner Rebel

Kevin Flores has been part of the Design Better community for years — we first met him in 2017, while he was leading design at 23andMe, back when we were researching how design teams are structured fo...

14 Okt 39min

Randy Hunt: Notion and Etsy design leader on why the best design teams stay small

In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser’s class, a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words u...

7 Okt 40min

Matt Owens: Athletics co-founder on keeping your creative fire lit

When Aarron was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside Philadelphia, he and his coworkers used to crowd around a monitor to study volumeone.com. Most websites back then had a picture, ...

5 Okt 55min

Blaine Billingsley: OpenAI designer on the collaboration problem AI hasn't solved yet

Blaine Billingsley is a staff designer at OpenAI, and his path there was anything but a straight line. He studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar in Texas for a living (he re...

23 Sep 28min

Mack Paul: Co-author of Miracle Road on designing places where innovation happens

In the mid-1950s, North Carolina was one of the poorest states in the country. Its economy ran on tobacco, furniture, and textiles — all three in decline — and its universities were turning out talent...

17 Sep 44min