IBM’s Katrina Alcorn: Developing partnerships

Episode 64 of the Design Better Podcast

If you lead a team of over 700 people, what skills would you need to bring to the table to help them collaborate effectively? In today’s episode, we chat with Katrina Alcorn, General Manager of Design at IBM, about how she develops partnerships across her organization to resolve conflicts and get aligned.

We also talk to Katrina about the challenges that large teams face in remote and hybrid environments, how her training in journalism influences her work as a leader, and what she learned about living a balanced life from writing her book Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink.

Bio

Katrina Alcorn spent the first decade+ of her career as a consultant, leading strategic design and research initiatives for startups, non-profits, and Fortune 500s in a variety of industries including financial services, medical devices, energy, e-commerce, the arts, and education. 

In 2015 she went “in-house” and learned what it means to be a change-maker from the inside. Katrina built two successful design practices, the first at Hot Studio (bought by Facebook in 2013) and the second at Autodesk, centralizing all digital design and research functions, leading to major improvements in e-commerce sales and customer satisfaction.