Catherine’s passion is delivering world-class products and services that drive customer delight, adoption and loyalty. As VP Consumer UX at Google, she is responsible for defining the end-to-end experience across these critical business and user products. Catherine co-authored the book “Understanding Your Users,” and is an active writer and speaker on creativity, innovation and design. She has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Huffington Post and TEDx. She has twice been selected by the Silicon Valley Business Journal – as one of Silicon Valley’s “40 Under 40” young tech leaders, and as one of Silicon Valley’s 100 Most Influential Women. Catherine made Forbes list of “Top 10 Rising Stars at The World’s Most Innovative Companies.”
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Catherine leads a multi-disciplinary product experience team across Google, overseeing the company’s largest properties – Search, Assistant, Geo, Payments, Shopping, Travel and Lens in support of billions of users around the globe.
Catherine’s passion is transforming corporate culture by making customer-focus a driver of innovation and change. She leads Google’s Consumer UX (User Experience) team where her group’s mission is to create world-class products and services for customers, partners and employees that drive adoption and loyalty. Her team is responsible for company-wide product design, training, information experience, and business process reinvention. Prior to DocuSign, Catherine held similar pioneering roles at Citrix, Salesforce.com and Oracle.
Catherine co-authored the book “Understanding Your Users,” and is an active writer and speaker on creativity, innovation and design. She has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Huffington Post, and TEDx. She has twice been selected by the Silicon Valley Business Journal – in 2011 as one of Silicon Valley’s tech leaders, and in 2013 as one of Silicon Valley’s 100 Most Influential Women. Also in 2013, Catherine made Forbes list of “Top 10 Rising Stars at The World’s Most Innovative Companies.” In 2014, the National Diversity Council named her one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology.
Catherine is a board member for the Fortune 500 company, Insight Enterprises, as well as the non-profits California College of the Arts and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. She also serves as an advisor for Wootric. She holds a Masters of Applied Sciences, specializing in Human Factors, from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Science from Memorial University of Newfoundland. When she’s not working, you’ll find her swimming, biking and running in preparation for her next triathlon.
Catherine is a strong advocate of career advancement and a supporter of diversity in the workplace. She has particularly focused on mentoring women in the technology industry. As a senior executive and board member she strives to empower other women reach their potential. In recognition of this, in 2015 Citrix created the “Courage to WIN” award. This tribute is giving annually to a woman who exemplifies the ability to impact the success of others.
Catherine is also a voice in the community to support girls still in school and women who are early in their careers. She has been actively involved with the Clinton Global Initiatives for Girls, TechWomen, TechWomen Canada and has served as a judge for a variety of tech hackathons for young girls (e.g, ChimeHack, Technovation)
Speech Topics
The User Experience
Has the user experience (UX) company significantly advanced over the last decade? We have to ask ourselves why we see so many corporations with dedicated design, innovation and customer success teams, yet their products and services do not reflect this investment. Part of the challenge is that there is an abundance of craftspeople, but we still lack of strong UX leadership to drive culture change. As leaders, Catherine says we need to inspire and ignite a new way of thinking about factors that contribute to exceptional design and develop strategies for achieving this great goal…and most of them have nothing to do with design itself! In her keynote, Catherine will share practical information and advice to aid UX leaders in their leadership crusade.
