Design as a Growth Engine: Lessons for Founders and Leaders
Ben will spend an hour delving deep into how design fuels growth, drawing on lessons from startups to Fortune 10 big tech companies. He will unpack what “good design” really means, why it’s essential to business viability, and how founders can make design a cross-functional driver of customer and employee engagement, retention, and long-term value.
A few discrete topics that Ben will cover include:
- Three design stories from his career: Wunderlist, Microsoft under Satya Nadella, and SAP’s turnaround
- Unpacking the “design” black box: what it is, why it matters, and how to achieve it
- The purpose of business is serving society, and how design plays a central role
- Innovation factors: balancing business, technology, and human needs
- Practical frameworks, including Google’s HEART framework and a simple “Design ABC” approach, to assess and improve your customer experience
- How to use design to drive customer lifetime value and create a culture of innovation and engagement
The goal will be to leave the session with practical, founder-ready tools for elevating design from an afterthought to a core engine of growth and differentiation.
Ben Lehnert is a seasoned design executive with over 20 years of expertise in creating products that people love and leading world-class teams that make them. He is the founder of 74West, a sleeves-up, hands-on advisory practice for CEOs, executives, and boards navigating pivotal moments in their organizations. He also serves as an Entrepreneurship & Design Fellow at Princeton University, exploring the convergence of entrepreneurship, humanistic design, and business leadership. Previously, Ben was hired by SAP’s executive board as Chief Design Officer to lead the reset of the company’s UX strategy. Before that, he was a senior design executive at Microsoft and served as the CDO at Wunderlist through its acquisition by Microsoft for over $150 million.
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