// customer-first by design
Product Design, Research, Content & DesignOps Leader | Transforming organizations towards customer-centricity | Currently scaling Design at EPI, building Wero the European payment solution |
Former Global Lead Design Ops PayPal
HI. I’M TALKE
I help organisations build the design capability they actually need — not the one they think they want.
I lead Experience Design at EPI (European Payments Initiative), shaping how 50 million Europeans pay with Wero. That means building a cross-disciplinary team — product design, content, research, ops, and localisation — across a remote-first, multi-country organisation, while laying the operational and quality foundations for market rollout across Europe.
Before EPI, I ran UX, My Dear, a strategic design and facilitation consultancy working with leadership teams navigating product model transitions — helping organisations move from inside-out to outside-in, establish design governance, and build the conditions for sustained product excellence. One engagement at CDP involved leading globally distributed teams across five product groups to deliver data products for supply chain reporting, while establishing C-level alignment on product vision.
Prior to that, eleven years at PayPal — growing from EMEA product design roles across Berlin, Paris, and London, to Senior Manager for International Credit UX, to Global Design Operations Lead. The work I’m proudest of: building PayPal’s European credit suite — revolving credit in the UK, installments across Germany, France, Italy, Spain — and integrating credit into Apple Checkout. Later, as Global Lead Design Operations, I led the company’s migration to Figma and integrated various startup teams into the global organisation, while preserving lean innovation practices.
What ties it together is systems thinking applied to people, process, and product at once. My superpower is helping teams solve the right problem — through facilitation, structured discovery, and cross-functional alignment — before anyone writes a line of code or ships a pixel.
I hold a PhD in Communication Science from Hamburg University, studied as a Fulbright Scholar at Temple University, and have published in peer-reviewed journals and Smashing Magazine. I’m a certified LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator and AI for Business graduate — and I use both in practice.
Outside work, I’m a founding member and mentor at leadHER, invested in the next generation of design leaders.
Top skills
Strategy • Design Thinking • Leadership • Global Teams
where I focus
-
Discovery work and in particular design sprints - are key to creating a shared understanding across the various product disciplines.
While full sprints might not always be possible under delivery pressure - applying the principles and finding the moments when Design sprints get priority - is key to a healthy Design organisation. -
Not just because I’ve held this role myself during my time at PayPal - but because I see it work to great effect as part of my team every day - I firmly believe in the power of DesignOps.
Having this role enables teams to do their best work, and reduce the friction that is part of any organisation - whether scale-up or corporate.
-
Framing the problem right matters - whether you work with or without AI.
Setting that initial framing up correctly helps organisations save both time and money, because you’re aligned as a team and have defined the goals clearly.
Even if “building the thing” is getting cheaper - setting the context, having a shared understanding and then being able to edit and clearly define what good looks like - that’s the work that remains to be done. -
Defining your Product Vision, Guiding Principles and Playing field is key to reducing complexity and setting the context that enables empowered teams.
Without that context - teams can’t focus on what has impact, what feels relevant and what builds the brand and products that matter to the people and markets you serve. Understanding the elements of the playing field and helping to define them is what I’m here to do.
-
The hard problem to tackle and the real business value of design - getting customer-first thinking embedded across the business and not just in the product.
Spreading design thinking and activities across different departments and aligning teams arounds customer needs and e.g. “jobs to be done”.
Sharing the same understanding about “who we serve” is key to building products people love. Shared context is what counts - even more so when thinking about Automation and AI.
-
As most things in life - creating truly effective design organizations is a two-way street.
It’s about teaching the business to understand design, and teaching designers how to speak and understand the business.
The most successful and strategic designers know how to influence their stakeholders, because they can establish trust relationships and know how to talk revenue, metrics and outcomes.
-
Starts with hiring for attitude (at times over hard skills) and is part of how I look at every day team leadership.
And it matters because it:
Improves cross-functional ways of working
Allows the team and the individuals in it to keep learning
Increases resilience & meaningful personal growth
Builds strategic foresight and continuously raises the bar
“Talke has kicked off a mindset shift in our team, putting the experience of our employees as a starting point, not an afterthought. Her engaging and easy to follow moderation style and template design has enabled us to embed different ways of working”
WINNING BY BEING CUSTOMER-OBSESSEDCREATING CUSTOMER-OBSESSED ORGANIZATIONs
It’s a hard problem to tackle - getting whole organizations to think and act customer-first instead of reflecting their own organizational structure and hierarchies in every single process and interaction. It’s a problem I’ve been obsessed with ever since researching the usability of the European Union website for my PhD.
Turns out - there’s no magic bullet. But this is the hard problem to solve, the one that effects your whole business and the one that shows the business value of design.
In the aptly titled Business Value of Design, by McKinsey & Company the authors point out that the value of design comes from four different dimensions.
More than a feeling - it’s analytical leadership
More than a department - it’s cross-functional talent
More than a phase - it’s continuous iteration
More than a product - it’s user experience
That’s hard and not a “low-hanging fruit” as they like to say.
But it’s one of the those complex problems worth solving - because it will effect everything else. If you can make your business understand design and customers, while making your designers speak metrics and revenue - that’s how you build your differentiation.
Preparing for a Design Sprint
One of the best ways to use that 1 week of a design sprints as efficiently as possible - is by preparing well and running a problem framing workshop in advance.
This helps to -
Get a clear understanding of priorities between different departments
Establish the known knowns and the known unknowns
Define the boundaries of the problem space and align teams around the same purpose
This prep work helps to then solve the right problem during the design sprint, and not just “solve the problem right”. And whether remote or on-site this is the part that proves being prepared makes the joint working part so much more productive and focused.