Meet the Speaker — Lauren Giacobbo

Lauren Giacobbo is a UX Strategist for Vanguard. Her workshop sessoin at WITS Fall 2022 Virtual Summit is “Setting a Collaborative vision — UX, Dev and Product: Brainstorm facilitation and analysis”.

Why is speaking at WITS important to you?

I am excited to speak at WITS! I have been working in the tech space for all of my career. I have worked with various teams from Sales teams to Development teams, where I have spent time collaborating and building experiences that satisfy multi-faceted needs.

What or who inspires you?

I am inspired by my children. As a mother, it is important for me to watch how my children interact with technology, and how I can help to make their experiences better through UX. My children also remind me to stay present, grounded and to prioritize enjoying life, which keeping my physical and mental health in tact.

I also am inspired by women and how they juggle their busy lives and a professional career. I think it is important that we share successes and failure. It keeps women connected and gives the feeling of support.

Most useful article you’ve read in the last month

Recently, I have been involved in a tragedy that happened at my daughter’s school. It has led me down a path of research to inform my family about bullying on social media: https://medium.com/designatmeta/using-thoughtful-design-to-fight-bullying-on-instagram-d7943d7cb721

Also, I love the NNgroup website. I frequent this website often. I recently read: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/luxury-user-groups-journeys/

When you were a kid what was your dream job?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fashion designer. I have always loved fashion and how it is a form of self-expression. There is also something about finding comfort in fashion. For example, I have a favorite sweater that I wear all the time during the winter. The moment I put it on, I think of family, the holidays, and hot cocoa. Fashion doesn’t have to be expensive, or exactly on trend. For me, it’s about how I feel when I put on even the simplest piece of clothing.

Tell us something about your session

My session (Setting a Collaborative vision — UX, Dev and Product: Brainstorm facilitation and analysis) will focus on how UX practitioners plan and juggle the mixture of research, business requirements and customer insights to plan a vision. I will bring a template for reuse and teach the workshop attendees how to improve collaboration.

What other sessions or speakers are you most excited to see?

All of the sessions are great topics, but, I am excited to dive into Data Science with “Deploying custom Machine Learning Models in AWS Sagemaker”