About Katie Koch
Katie Koch is a design leader at Spotify in Stockholm, where she works with a talented, multi-disciplinary team to innovate on the Premium user experience. Before moving to Sweden, she led a design team at American Express creating experiences that meet the needs of people traditionally underserved by financial institutions.
Across her career, Katie is driven by a passion for teaching and growth. While living in NYC, she was co-founder of Project: Interaction, an after-school program that teaches interaction design to high school students. She has taught design at Parsons, the New School for Design, the School of Visual Arts, and The Cooper-Hewitt in New York.
Talk
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
It’s an exciting time to be a designer. Everything is growing! Teams, products, users. We’re in a never-ending marathon to grow and operate at scale. At Spotify we’ve been growing at a rapid pace for over a decade, creating a service that reaches hundreds of millions of fans around the world.
Growth presents all kinds of challenges that have little to do with the craft of UX design. How do we come up with great ideas and get them noticed amidst the sea of other great ideas? How do we get our whole organization as passionate about our users as we are? How do we collaborate across squads in our agile environment to create a user experience that doesn’t show the seams?
Service design is an essential tool for our team to tackle these problems. And as a team leader, I see even bigger results from doing the work of service design as part of our process. These activities make our designers stronger so they’re able to make faster, better decisions in the moments that matter. I’ll share how we’ve successfully brought service design into our practice, and how it’s changing the way we work with others.