UX Design
Andrew Doherty
Andrew began working in tech when internet modems operated at 11kb per second and made that funny noise while dialing up. Most recently he has been working in stealth mode on a disruptive startup that aims to safely give every human being on earth their own artificially intelligent super powers - Simby.
Prior to Simby, Andrew was leading a UX design team at Google in Mountain View California, focusing on deep tech and the products of the future. He was responsible for envisioning, prototyping, and building product solutions that affect the daily lives of billions of human beings. He is a TEDx speaker and has worked as a technology advisor in customer experience for a number of high profile multinational organisations in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Berlin and Sydney. With a wealth of real world experience, Andrew loves to help fellow UX designers to reach their personal or project related goals while being able to remain true to themselves, and the needs of their customers.
Stevie De La Cruz
Hieu Quach
Elizabeth Pek
Elizabeth (Liz) is a versatile, strategic and pragmatic UX professional with 20+ years experience in designing, developing and transforming market-leading digital products and customer experiences for B2C, B2B and B2B2C businesses in both start-ups and enterprise settings. She has held many Head of UX roles in Financial Services, Telecommunications, Media, and Health and Wellness industries, working on award winning products and helping these companies build their design teams and capabilities.
Liz is passionate about creating experiences that deliver WIN-WIN for business and customer, by combining UX with agile, lean-startup and Human-Centred-Design (HCD) approaches. She enjoys working on the full customer experience life cycle from ideation, strategy & vision through to development, execution and delivery. She also loves coaching individuals and teams towards high performance, and supporting them to achieve the best versions of themselves.
Matt Webb
Matt started his journey in design 22 years ago, revelled during the Flash Era, embraced the swing to accessibility and HTML & CSS, shiny web 2.0, HTML5, now the swing to user centric design and the rise of mobile and the plethora of digital devices and interfaces that now inhabit our lives.
More recently, Matt has been broadening his skills across a range of mediums & managing teams for media company Newscorp and currently running the user experience & design team at Fetch TV, Managing a 12 strong UX & Design team, based in Sydney and Kuala Lumpur covering a range of disciplines from Visual design, UI Design to UX Design and Research. Planning, designing and delivering the next generation of user interface for Fetch’s flagship TV Experience to the living rooms of over 1/2 million Australians.
Since owning his own Design Agency some years ago, Matt took a big interest in helping out and mentoring up and coming designers, he assisted in the creation and teaching of a web design course at Shillington College at the Sydney & Melbourne campuses and has given the occasional lecture at UTS in Sydney.
Yuxi Liu
Nick Busman
Alexis Reagan
Ken Wong
Ken has over 17 years experience in UX design, most of which has focused on mobile strategy and design. As Head of UX at Fairfax Media, Ken received multiple Australian Mobile awards for his user centred, mobile led contribution to iconic Australian brands such as the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), Domain, Good Food Guide and Realestate.com.au. Throughout his tenure, Ken’s leadership saw Fairfax double its UX capability and he was instrumental in the launch of key flagship products including the Domain mobile app, which many of us use every day.
Ken has a passion for tackling complex design challenges and turning these into experiences that feel second nature to consumers and it’s this drive that gets him out of bed every morning. This project is a unique opportunity to be mentored by one of Australia’s leading UX designers and we’re so excited to welcome Ken to the Harness Projects mentor team.
Diego Salvatierra
Diego has taken his design expertise into the worlds of tech, education, and public policy. He is adept at using in-depth qualitative research, including interviews, personas, and user journeys, to solve thorny problems, as well as bringing those insights into web and mobile designs. At Chile's Ministry of Education he used design thinking tactics to identify user needs and align conflicting stakeholders in national-scale projects such as the country's largest ever expansion of school Internet. He hired UX designers and pushed the adoption of Figma to improve Ministry websites and teacher-facing apps. Diego also helped inform the redesign of microcredentials at Autodesk's online platform, and has designed multiple web and mobile apps for education and beyond.
Diego developed his design skills at the Stanford d.school. He is currently an entrepreneur at South Park Commons, an incubator in San Francisco. When not in California, he enjoys spending time in the woods of Patagonia.
Andrew Hiles
Andrew has been designing for over 18 years – starting out as a graphic designer before moving across into digital. He’s worked on projects for household names for both agency-side and client-side.
Moving up the design ladder, Andrew now focuses his energies as Experiecne Chapter Lead at Commonwealth Bank. Andrew relishes a challenge and with solid experience leading UX teams on complex, large scale projects he’s seen his fair share of action. Andrew is a passionate customer advocate and derives his own personal satisfaction from creating experiences that make customer’s lives easier whilst adding value to the products he works on.
Mike Yap
Mike has been leading product and design teams for over 20 years. Starting in the madness of the dot com bubble, Mike's career has taken him from fast-growing startups to multinational corporations in Sydney, London and Tokyo and on to some of the biggest tech brands in Australia.
Mike is currently Head of Product at Mad Paws. He was previously Head of Product & Design at Gumtree, part of the eBay Classifieds Group, and Head of Experience at Hipages, Australia's largest two-sided marketplace for home services. Before that, Mike led design and product management for mobile innovation on the CommBank app.
Driven by the belief that the best customer experiences are made by passionate, empowered people, Mike is committed to coaching individuals to success and guiding organisations to new levels of product and design maturity.
Product Management
Andrew Doherty
Andrew began working in tech when internet modems operated at 11kb per second and made that funny noise while dialing up. Most recently he has been working in stealth mode on a disruptive startup that aims to safely give every human being on earth their own artificially intelligent super powers - Simby.
Prior to Simby, Andrew was leading a UX design team at Google in Mountain View California, focusing on deep tech and the products of the future. He was responsible for envisioning, prototyping, and building product solutions that affect the daily lives of billions of human beings. He is a TEDx speaker and has worked as a technology advisor in customer experience for a number of high profile multinational organisations in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Berlin and Sydney. With a wealth of real world experience, Andrew loves to help fellow UX designers to reach their personal or project related goals while being able to remain true to themselves, and the needs of their customers.
Onur Ekinci
Onur's specialisation is in building the product vision, strategy and function in early stage startups. Joining these companies from as early as under $20m valuation, and growing them in close collaboration with executive teams to over $250-$500M valuation and on their way to becoming Australia's next unicorns.
He is a strong business leader, who is passionate about designing, building and launching beautiful, delightful products. His experience covers a variety of industries, such as edtech, healthtech, fintech, proptech, which gives him a well rounded view on what it takes to win in any market.
Nima Idelkhani
With 15+ years of Product, Design and UX experience including numerous start-up and enterprise successes with global brands, some say Nima knows a thing or two about designing products that people want.
After a decade of mastering his craft, in 2017 Nima co-founded 'We Discover' a customer-centric digital agency focused on creating meaningful experiences and after creating a multimillion-dollar business in under 3 years he took his next big challenge, becoming the Chief Product Officer in 2020 at an emerging prop-tech company. He aimed to prove that a 100% customer-centred approach will deliver the most desired and profitable product to market irrespective of how "old and resistant to change" the industry is.
Nima has extensive experience and skill in business and product strategy, understanding human behaviours and desires and knowing how to merge it all to find the best product-market fit.
Oliver Mitchell
Oliver is a Product Manager at Prezzee, one of Australia's fastest growing tech companies (#15 on Deloitte Fast 50, 2020) where he leads New Product Development. He previously founded his own fintech start-up, Moneycado, which used open banking rails to co-ordinate and settle debts in groups. Moneycado is an alumni of Founders Factory accelerator programme.
Oliver believes that product managers should be creative as much as they are logistical. They are story-tellers, whether the medium is mock-ups, memos or presentations, and the anchoring voice in matters of strategy and decisions. He loves to use jobs-to-be-done to understand customers deeply, then draw on design tools to bring ideas to life quickly and effectively.
Digital Marketing
Ashleigh Bruton
Amber Dermoudy
Tiff Ng
Jessie Lin
Talk to Jessie about growing paid, owned and earned channels - she loves all things digital marketing. Her areas of specialty are performance, experimentation and behavioural marketing. She’s strategic yet hands on.
Currently Jessie leads the growth initiatives at Stockspot, Australia’s largest online investment advisor. Outside of work, she is also active in the mentoring space. She loves sharing knowledge through storytelling and interactive discussions.
Jessie has worked in health, technology and aviation, and holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Marketing and Finance) from UNSW. She is passionate about empowering consumers to make the right decisions, using simple and engaging communications. Jessie has recently been shortlisted in the 2021 Women In Finance Awards (Thought Leader of the Year).
Nell Norman-Nott
Nell has over 15 years’ marketing experience in listed and entrepreneurial environments spanning the UK, Europe and Asia Pacific regions. Originally from England, Nell has lived in Australia since 2009 where she held leadership roles at Yahoo7 and then at LinkedIn as Head of Marketing and Head of the Employer Brand and Media.
Nell has a passion for building marketing solutions that fit the most challenging client brief and as a team leader, combines this with building others’ skills at digital and content marketing. Nell is a public speaker at industry events most recently at the Digital Innovation Summit and Mumbrella360. Nell is a judge for the industry awards – B&T, Mumbrella & Women in Media. Nell continues her own learning, studying Psychology with Monash University which allows her to bring a deep understanding of the science of human behavior to marketing.
On this project, Nell will facilitate the learning of each student in the core areas of digital marketing; understanding an audience, crafting a digital content strategy, defining channels and measuring impact.
Rebecca Lovitt
Rebecca has a diverse portfolio of skills across strategy, marketing, experience design, and digital product development built over a rich career journey of nearly 20 years. She has headed up digital teams in corporates, health organisations, not-for-profits and tech start-ups.
Always curious and a passionate continuous learner, Rebecca thrives in environments where she can enable and empower others to be their best. Collaborative practice is at the heart of her operating style with Rebecca loving the challenges of bringing together teams of diverse talents with a clear shared objectives to work on transformative projects.
For Rebecca, the arena of digital marketing unites her love for user experience, creative, strategy and engagement in a space that continues to evolve rapidly.
Agility, adaptability and curiosity are both mindsets and values that guide her practice. Rebecca is working on a range of projects including Heading up Digital and Marketing at Leadership Victoria working on the implementation of new brand, web and marketing stack.