Leading the Brazil studio
Date: 2016-2017
Role: Studio Director, Motorola Mobility
Work Partners: PM, ENG, Marketing, Sales
Challenge
While under Google ownership, Motorola decided to re-establish a multidisciplinary design studio for Latin America in São Paulo, Brazil in order to serve as the region’s creative partner for product development, design awareness, and localization. Under my leadership, the studio defined and developed end-to-end experiences and innovations, and served as the eyes and ears of Motorola for social, design, and macro trends happening in the region.
Strategy & solutions
After relocating to São Paulo in 2015, I established a local chapter of the design organization’s “People Group” whose mission was to foster a creative work environment by providing access to educational experiences, social activities, and volunteer opportunities. The goal was to provide a sense of community for the design team and connect them to the other established studios in the US and China.
Within a year I became Director of the studio where I led a team of 13 professionals, defined the organizational structure, oversaw operations, career development, and culture. This studio consisted of a group of diverse specialists in industrial design, surface engineering, design research, user experience, and visual design.
I developed close relationships and partnerships with the business teams (marketing and sales) in the São Paulo office, as well as a highly collaborative relationship with the software engineers in a nearby factory site in Jaguariuna, Brazil. I drove design awareness throughout both sites, hosting open houses, organizing and participating in hackathons, joining the local R&D governing committee, and participating in a “consumer committee” that triaged issues facing the regional team in a just-in-time method. (e.g. My team and I developed multiple solutions to address pain points identified when our devices moved from Micro SIM to Nano-SIM cards. They included information for agents at the POS and customer care, as well as additional messaging in packaging and via software notifications.)
Outcome
While leading the Brazil studio, my focus was to create aspirational product concepts with the expressed goal of directly informing the following year’s product portfolio of both hardware and software. In 2016, one of my industrial designers defined the concept which later led to the Moto G5. Another worked closely with Lenovo’s Research and Technology (RNT) team to create foldable prototypes showcased at the 2016 Tech World convention—she later became the lead designer of Motorola’s first foldable Android device, the 2019 reboot of the wildly popular RAZR. Software concepts developed by my team also sparked creative solutions to showcase the capabilities of Motorola’s Mods at POS kiosks where security issues prevent the display of fully functional devices.
In-store final implementation of mods sell-in generated from our design concepts
Wrist-foldable developed in collaboration with Lenovo's Research and Technology team, demonstrated at Tech World 2016
Latin American retail store designs refined by the industrial design team
Gifts created as incentives for research studies conducted at Point of Sale Kiosks
Style caps developed for Latin America; social media was utilized to pick the winning concept
Uniforms for kiosks co-created with marketing and Marcelo Sommer
Packaging designed by the industrial designers