Nanda Dias
Product and Strategic Designer
overview of latest works
Designing with Purpose, Leading with Empathy
Hi, I’m Nanda Dias. I am a human centered designer with 20 years of experience shaping complex tech into meaningful digital products across startups and global enterprises like SAP and Fresenius Medical Care. I am currently looking for my next full time leadership role, while continuing to channel my passion into regenerative design side projects that bring me true purpose and joy.
Core Expertise:
Product Design Leadership & UX Strategy
Sustainability & SaaS Design (Enterprise & Healthcare)
Design Systems & User Research
Cross Functional Collaboration & Workshop Facilitation
I thrive in fast paced environments by leaning into uncertainty with curiosity, building vibrant design communities, and translating messy, rough ideas into products people love to use.
Take a look at how I bring these skills to life in my recent projects below.
My Leadership Journey
Over the last 4.5 years, I've had the opportunity to grow and apply my leadership skills more intentionally, particularly in product and UX design. This journey has taken me into purposeful and complex B2B domains, including Sustainability at SAP and, more recently, medical devices at Fresenius Medical Care.Along the way, I’ve contributed to several meaningful products, such as: SAP Sustainability Footprint Management and SAP Sustainability Control Tower.
I also had the privilege of co-leading an internally driven initiative at SAP: the Design Hub Berlin, which I launched together in collaboration with our Chief Design Officer, DesigOps team and the local co-leads Beca and Zahra. The hub focused on empowering the design community through a variety of initiatives, including knowledge-sharing sessions, networking events, and cross-team collaboration. Learn more about my journey here.
Leaf Mobile App
Leaf mobile app was the big winner of DevEx Challenge on Sustainable Integrated Mobility. A short Design Sprint of 3 days was the time frame we had to submit a solution focusing on UN Sustainable Goal of Climate Action.
SAP Data Intelligence Platform
SAP leadership has been voicing the relevance of integrating our systems. A mindset shift from focus on scattered tools towards the idea of platforms. This way we could provide our users with a seamless user experience end-to-end. In the Machine Learning foundation team, our UX design team lead have as a mission to harmonize visual and interaction patterns in the 7 tools involved in the Data Intelligence Platform, and continuously validate the use of each new component added to this system.
This design concept incorporated SAP strategic aspects of data integration, Conversational UX and usage of Machine Learning APIs.
We looked into travel requests, for its frequency and relevance on expenses controlling. Our concise data visualisation, the systems integration and the help of Co-Pilot helped managers (non-experts in finance) quickly understand if a travel approval was risky at that point in time. As well as team members got responses faster and with the help of Co-Pilot could find alternative options, if a booking was crossing the budget line.
SAP RealSpend ML Anomaly Detection
SAP RealSpend AI Supported Approvals
Supporting budget monitoring in real-time, we worked on mistaken bookings, future expenses forecasting and smart tagging.
The machine learning feature challenge demanded from us ideation and quick iterations based on experts feedback. The 3 PoCs were refined until one could be finally incorporated into our product, based on real findings.
Designing for Change
a.k.a DesignOps
A keynote by Kristin Skinner (author of Org Design for Design Orgs) inspired me to reflect on my team and organisation current state. I started with 3 fundamental questions:
Do we feel we all contribute to a better product?
Do we feel our work is appreciated?
Are we having fun working together?
Which paved my way towards a new investigation I called “Designing for Change”. See Project
Regenerative Marine Stewardship | Gen_we
A Blueprint for Regenerative Tourism
What does it look like to bridge the gap between human purpose and planetary need? Gen_We is a comprehensive strategic case study designed to explore exactly that. Grounded in Doughnut Economics and the 30x30 UN Ocean Treaty, this project examines how restorative human experiences can actively fund marine protected areas. Dive into the full strategy, pitch deck, and research below to see how I approach complex problem-solving, market strategy, and sustainable design.
See Project
AI Assisted Reporting
I led design strategy for SAP Sustainability Control Tower, in this effort our goal was to release an AI sustainability reporting initiative. My biggest achievements leading the UX Design team was ensuring early validation and an Agile mindset that prevented €280k in rework costs and accelerated delivery by 6 months. By championing discovery-first approach and orchestrating across ML engineers, AI ethics teams, and customer stakeholders, I de-risked a high-stakes investment before engineering committed full capacity.
See Project