“Curiosity keeps me open. Courage keeps me moving.”
My Leadership Journey
My case studies show what I shipped. This page shows how I lead: through complexity, across geographies, and long before any of it had a job title attached to it.
Leading through complexity
I’ve built design teams from nothing more than a mandate and a deadline, twice. At SAP Sustainability, I was handed a blank page: no design team, no precedent, and one of the company’s most closely watched products due to ship within a matter of quarters. I hired, onboarded and mentored a team of up to eight designers, spread across Germany, the Czech Republic and India, coordinating daily with roughly six development squads across those same three countries. Two of the designers I mentored were promoted during that time, junior to mid-level, mid to senior. That’s the part of leadership a case study never shows: building people. It takes more patience than building interfaces.
The scale doesn’t faze me. Years earlier, on SAP’s Data Intelligence Platform, I led UX consistency across roughly ten engineering teams in seven cities, each with products that had already shipped, already found their own users, and now had to change to fit a harmonisation effort nobody on those teams had asked for. People like their established products. Convincing a team to rework something that already worked took as much soft skill and design review as it did design craft. This was before Fiori was fully established as SAP’s own design guideline, so I helped build a minimum design system for the platform from close to nothing. SAP’s leadership took harmonisation seriously enough to make it a company-wide mandate: Sam Yen, SAP’s Chief Design Officer at the time, asked every design team to follow a shared timeline to get there. Rework dropped. Trust across a genuinely global, genuinely disagreeing group of engineers went up.
Trusted to build community
In 2023, SAP’s Chief Design Officer, Arin Bhowmick, and his DesignOps team asked me to lead the newly formed Design Hub Berlin: a role built to reconnect designers who’d been shipping in isolated product teams for years, one of the least visible and most human forms of leadership I’ve practised. I ran monthly gatherings of twenty to forty designers, coached the leadership team through OKR planning, and made space for the unglamorous parts of culture-building: showing up consistently, more than getting it right the first time.
“Getting consensus there wasn’t a facilitation technique. It was a practice.”
Nanda, on leading Design Hub Berlin
Machine learning before the hype cycle
I was designing for machine learning years before generative AI made it a boardroom topic. From 2016, I shaped SAP RealSpend’s anomaly-detection and forecasting features with finance experts and controllers; from 2019, I helped lead UX for SAP’s Machine Learning Foundation team on the Data Intelligence Platform. Neither of those had the word AI in a pitch deck yet.
That instinct didn’t come from nowhere. My Master’s in Digital Media (Universität Bremen) researched how new technology and media reshape human behaviour. My thesis built a location-based musical album app and asked what happens to listening, composing and place once a walk becomes the interface. It was published in MIT Press’s Leonardo Music Journal and presented at ACM’s Audio Mostly conference in Aalborg, Denmark, in 2014, where I was one of three women among forty-five researchers, and the only one from South America. The same question, what does this new capability actually do to a person, is the one I still ask before I design a single screen for a machine-learning feature.
Where it started: B2C, hardware, and two founders who trusted me completely
Before any of that, there was TobyRich, a Bremen startup building smartphone-controlled toy planes, cars, boats and gliders for a market that didn’t exist yet. For nearly three years I was the whole design function, working directly with the company’s two founders, Ulrich Ditschler and Tobias Dazenko: corporate identity, four product identities, packaging, app design, and the material that was in the room at every investor meeting and trade fair. Design leadership doesn’t need a headcount. It needs someone willing to own the outcome when there’s no one else to hand it to. It’s also where I first fell in love with B2C: the immediacy of designing for someone with no context, no patience, and plenty of curiosity.
The life that built the leader
I grew up in Rio de Janeiro, then moved for London, then three German cities (Dessau, Bremen, and now Berlin), with regular time in Oslo, my partner’s family’s home in Norway. Different cultures solve the same problem differently. Living inside that difference, again and again, is where my systems thinking actually comes from.
In 2015, before the move to Berlin, I took a three-month career break and travelled solo through Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines. Years later, a road trip through Japan with two close friends. Some of it I did through books that changed how I show up at work: Dare to Lead by Brené Brown, which gave me the language for courage as a practice rather than a personality trait; Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, on making things without a guarantee they’ll matter; Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, which now underpins a regenerative tourism concept I design in my own time; and The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo, still the most practical book I’ve read on actually leading people.
A transition from SAP to Fresenius didn’t meet my expectations, so I took a deliberate break to reflect on what came next. I used it well: d.MBA, to sharpen how I connect design to business decisions, and hands-on time with AI tools rather than reading about them from a distance. In June 2025, I sat on a Women in Tech panel at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences, talking to master’s students about the same leap I’d made years before: choosing an unfamiliar country, an unfamiliar industry, an unfamiliar language, on purpose.
Placeholder imagery — swap for your own trip photos whenever you’re ready.
Where research became a way of living
The same curiosity that shaped my Master’s thesis never left. I still make sound collages from field recordings and home-made vocals in Ableton and Audacity. I learned to mix with vinyl, and my colleagues have told me, more than once, to put DJing on my CV. None of it is a side project I do despite the day job. It’s the same question, asked in a different medium: what does this technology, this format, this space, actually do to the person experiencing it.