Customer Obsessed Design

Sara Beckman is an Earl F. Cheit Faculty Fellow at the Haas School of Business where she designs and delivers courses on design, innovation and product management and a Teaching Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department in the College of Engineering. Her 25 years of experience teaching design and innovation-related topics at the Haas School of Business culminated in creating a course, Problem Finding, Problem Solving, which draws from design thinking, critical thinking and systems thinking literature. That course is now offered to all business students at Haas, and prepares them both for their Applied Innovation projects as well as for their work in their own jobs.

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Her recent research focuses on the role of learning diversity on design teams, and on the pedagogy of teaching design. For the past two years, she leveraged her teaching and research experience in serving as the Chief Learning Officer of the recently founded Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation within University of California, Berkeley's College of Engineering. Sara directs the Product Management Program for the Berkeley's Center for Executive Education, serving 350 product managers from around the world each year. Before joining Berkeley-Haas, Sara worked in the Operations Management Services group at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and ran the Change Management Team at Hewlett-Packard. Sara received her BS, MS and PhD degrees from Stanford University in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management.

Michael Barry teaches Needfinding and Cross Cultural Design at Stanford University’s Design School (d.School). He teaches the nation’s top students, at Harvard, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, how to connect innovation to new understandings of customers. At Stanford, he is a Consulting Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Michael also serves as a guest lecturer at the Harvard School of Business and the University of California Haas School of Business.

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A founder of Point Forward, Michael has over two decades of experience providing strategic innovation at the critical early stages of the product development process. With a wide range of expertise—from engineering to design to cultural studies— he has restructured research and innovation processes, provided strategic project management, and designed over 80 products, from mainframes to disposable diapers.

Known for his infectious energy and enthusiasm, Michael consistently inspires individuals and companies to create new ideas—from abstract theories of consumer behavior to tangible product designs. He believes in the power of “learning by doing,” spending hundreds of hours each year interviewing consumers and experiencing the environments where they live and work. His clients include Sony, IBM, Kimberly-Clark, HP, Merck, Shure, Johnson Diversey, Ericsson, Nestlé, Wells Fargo Bank, Wrigley, and several divisions of Unilever. His teams have received numerous awards from ID Magazine, IDSA, and Business Week, and have been featured in Product Design and International Design yearbooks. In addition, Michael has been a featured speaker at leading business forums including the Industrial Designers Society of America, the Management Roundtable, and the Product Development and Management Association. Michael received his BS in Mechanical Engineering and his MS in Product Design from Stanford University School of Engineering.

Michelle Jia is a design researcher, and lecturer at Stanford University, where she teaches needfinding and design thinking. She emphasizes real-life qualitative research techniques and leading innovation from the ground up, including ethnographic research techniques, live prototyping and team innovation techniques.

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She has pursued design research in Paris, Tokyo, Seoul and Bogotá, completed an honors thesis for Stanford on the intersection of time, ethics and politics, been nominated for a Grammy alongside Stanford's illustrious Chamber Chorale, designed the look-and-feel of a nutritional curriculum for ordinary kids in Shanghai and created over 200 editorial graphics for an online humanities salon called Arcade. No matter what she does, her work is informed by her deep faith that it is our duty to grow each other in our humanity -- and that education, design and the arts have an important role to play in our growth.

Michelle's current home base is the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is a design researcher and writer.