KRISTIN SKINNER
ADVISOR. AUTHOR. EXECUTIVE.
Expertise in organization design, management, and operations.
Kristin has made it her mission to make organizations and teams of all sizes more effective.
Design Advisor and Executive leading organizations and driving growth through organizational design, experience design, and customer success.
Kristin has served as an advisor to CEOs and CDOs from early-stage startups to Fortune 10 companies (including Airbnb, Disney, Netflix, Nike, Nordstrom, Walmart, Wells Fargo) in designing and delivering exceptional experiences across audiences, channels, products, and services, and designing teams and organizations.
As a Design Executive (Microsoft, Adaptive Path, Capital One, Chase, and Expedia Group), Kristin excels at building teams and company infrastructure and redesigning organizations for growth and operational effectiveness.
WORK WITH KRISTIN
In 2017, Kristin founded &GSD, an Experience Design Consultancy, to advise on Design Leadership and Organization Design. Since then, she has advised executive leaders at Nike, Grab, Adobe, Zendesk, Grubhub, Netflix, Nordstrom, Walmart, Wells Fargo, and the country of Ireland.
Work directly with Kristin to design your organization and elevate design within your team and company.
Learn more about the ways we can partner together:
Organization Design
You can’t change the product or service without changing the organization.
An organization's output is the result not only of its skills and experience, but also of the sophistication and sensitivity of how it operates. Yet most organizations struggle to create growth for common reasons such as misalignment between corporate strategy and structure as well as gaps between a function’s role and required capabilities.
Kristin will partner with you and your peers to design your organization around outcomes while evolving the skills and capabilities needed to achieve them.
Design Leadership
A team’s output is the result not only of its skill, but the experience and sensitivity of its leaders.
Kristin created and leads "Masterclass: Design Leadership Intensive" for established and rising leaders focusing on the 3 Ps of effective Design Leadership, Management, and Operations: People, Practices, and Partnerships.
She currently teaches two courses – Operations and Career Strategy – with Design Leadership at Scale.
Kristin delivers keynotes and masterclasses at conferences and in-house events, or to you and your team leaders.
Operating Models
How teams work is just as important as what they make.
Most employees at mid- to large-size companies spend 60% or more of their time focusing on the "work about the work", which is understanding who is working on what, when, and why. Creativity and productivity suffer because processes, practices, and operating and engagement models are misaligned or undefined.
Kristin will design a holistic leadership operating framework, establish and enhance organizational links, and align disparate teams and functions around shared goals and outcomes.
Kristin and her collective partners at &GSD know how to assess, define, build, and scale high-performing and diverse teams and organizations, and will provide you with a custom playbook to structure, evolve, elevate, and motivate your leaders and teams.
Focus Areas
Executive Leadership • Organization Design • Product Design • Strategy • Operations • Technology • Innovation • R&D
Activities + Outcomes
Map desired organizational and operating models • Articulate clear frameworks for quality • Define design’s roles with clarity and purpose, and relationships with peer functions • Chart experience-design specific career pathways • Advocate for and establish Design Operations practices • Craft future visions and roadmaps to achieve them • Build strong relationships with peers and executives • Communicate value with impact
ABOUT KRISTIN SKINNER
Executive. Advisor. Author. Keynote Speaker. Workshop Leader.
Kristin has made it her mission to make organizations more effective.
As a design executive and expert on organization design, management, and operations, Kristin guides and equips global leaders and organizations to tame ambiguity, embrace structure and rigor, and introduce new operating models and process improvements. She has designed and executed organizational transformations in her executive leadership roles at Expedia Group, Chase, Capital One, Adaptive Path, and Microsoft.
As the founder of &GSD, a customer experience consultancy that addresses the common problems many organizations face – organization design, scale, and the resulting change management – Kristin has advised executive leaders at Nike, Grab, Adobe, Zendesk, Airbnb, Disney, SK Telecom, USAA, Wells Fargo, Grubhub, and the country of Ireland. She designed and leads Masterclass: Design Leadership Intensive, an advanced-level course for senior and rising design leaders ready to address the most common challenges Design Leaders face, and learn practical approaches to improve Design Practice, People, and Partnerships.
Her book Org Design for Design Orgs - the first book dedicated to the organization, management, and operations of in-house design teams - and related talks encourage everyone, from individual contributors to the CEO, to take on the work of organization design. Since its publication, it has been cited as "A must-read for any organization looking to maximize the impact of its design team".
Kristin is a frequent conference keynoter and workshop leader. As a community builder, she co-created and led curation of the DesignOps Summit series. Now in its seventh year, the conference attracts attendees from 22 countries and 360 companies, including 60% of the Fortune 100. Under Kristin's leadership, the community has grown to over 10,000 people worldwide with annual conferences that have audiences of over 1,000 people.