About Katarina Bagherian

Katarina operates on a core belief: you only build a winning product if you’re solving the right customer problem. Her obsession is turning messy, human needs into product strategy and effective solutions, at scale. 

She first cut her teeth in the world of San Francisco startups, where accurate customer insights weren’t a nice-to-have, but critical to keeping the lights on.

One of her missions is to prove that deep customer understanding isn’t just for researchers, it’s the most powerful tool any team member can wield, a message she actively spreads through guest lectures, writing, and community mentorship.

What is your vision on the creative industry and impact on the finance industry? What are exciting innovations that impact your work?

AI and the broader economic climate have been putting newfound pressure on the UX field to redefine what we uniquely bring to the table, and how we do it. In the B2B enterprise finance industry, which tends to face the extra pressures of stringent regulations, we’ve had to get creative with the (compliant) tooling we use and how we keep the quality of customer understanding high amidst increasing demands for speed.

The most exciting innovations impacting my work, personally, are the spark and creativity that come from the human curiosity and connections around me. Increasingly I see how the most valuable and complex challenges to resolve are the uniquely human ones that require deep empathy, connection and curiosity.

Share this page:

Keynote
Katarina Bagherian

Think Like an Owner: Five Human Skills AI Won't Commoditize Soon

Our industry is deep in an era of automation anxiety and a question that keeps coming up is: which skills should UXers actually invest in to stay essential, not just employed?

Here's my answer from a decade of working alongside founding teams, CEOs and board members who had their own capital on the line. I watched them obsess over parts of the business nobody asked them to. I watched them make calls with incomplete information because nobody else was going to. And at some point I realized I'd been absorbing these habits, and they were making my work more valuable than any craft skill alone ever had.

I'll walk you through a project where five of these ownership habits compounded, starting with mapping where the real business anxiety lived, and ending with a decision that had big bottom-line impact. What made it land was thinking like someone whose own money was on the line, and craft alone won't get us there.

Our inspirational speakers

Jeroen van Geel

Independent Creative Strategist

Ivo van Hulten

Director of UX
@Porsche

Natalia Marmolejo

Design Lead
@Rabobank

Julia Bastian

VP of Product
@Alasco

Diantha Boll

Senior Product Designer @Eneco

Do you want to get in touch with us?

Let's have a chat