Design Leadership Experience

Project Highlights

IBM Design Language

Oversaw a team to partner with IBM Design to create a usable, scalable, modern design system that accelerated IBM’s efforts to equip 4,000+ product lines with a design-led competitive edge.

Inspirus

Led the effort to envision, design, and launch an employee engagement platform incorporating behavioral economics and gamification to transform the User Experience with measurable impact.

Led a team to support the initial launch of the Watson AI platform, demonstrating its value through rapidly prototyping real-world use cases in the healthcare, banking, and financial services sectors.

Mercedes-Benz R&D

Collaborated with Mercedes-Benz R&D on multiple initiatives to explore how to use human-centered methodologies for research, ideation, innovation, and organizational change.

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Team Member Testimonials

Liya has played a critical role in my career development, sharing all she can about the roles and tools of product development from strategy to execution... As a manager, she always puts her employees first. We regularly discussed where my interests may align with to business opportunities; how to build momentum through strong planning and agile execution; and how to manage stakeholder expectations to realize success. Liya instilled me with an amazing set of values that I use everyday in leading, managing, and continuing to grow my own skills with every free moment.

Zoe Bridges, Head of Customer Experience, Airtable

There are very few people I have worked with that were so incredibly knowledgeable of their craft. Liya is without a doubt one of those people. Her guidance and nurturing nature taught me invaluable lessons about user experience, client relationships, business strategy, leadership, and the list goes on. Liya is someone I hope to cross paths with again. I hope to someday mentor someone as she mentored me. Anyone who is lucky enough to work with Liya will have an unforgettable experience.

Luis Gutierrez, Sr Product Design Manager, Upwork

Liya is a catalyst. When she walks into a room she brings a powerful dynamism that energizes those around her. She balances a mixture of wisdom and irreverence that shakes up any product space she enters. At DesignMap, we worked closely together on several large projects during which I experienced accelerated growth. She coached me to think bigger and simpler while allowing my strengths to shine. She’s a natural mentor and teacher, and I learned a ton by watching her work and lead. Her big heart and playful spirit helped me stay connected to optimism and possibilities during the most challenging times. I feel blessed that I crossed paths with Liya and that we continue to stay in touch!

Eddie Hsieh, Sr UX Designer, DesignMap

Liya has been an inspiration for me at Liquidnet. She possesses a unique ability to work with inviduals/teams to articulate the problem space and bring their best ideas and talents forward. Liya and I are on the User Experience team at Liquidnet. Back when I first started working at Liquidnet, she motivated me to proactively make fuller use of my skillset and explore creative methods in actualizing concepts. She takes on a progressive approach to her own work by continually evolving processes and techniques. She's also multifaceted – I've seen her shine in many areas of design: service, strategic, interaction, etc. And I absolutely admire her presence. She's full of energy and can easily light up any room she walks in to.

Lily Cho, Lead Product Designer, Teachers Pay Teachers

Client Partner Testimonials

I can’t believe what we achieved in such a short time. Our Executives from Germany were very impressed. We are so grateful for Liya’s professional facilitation, guidance and her great and lovely personality.

Margarete Wies, VP Advanced UX Design, Mercedes-Benz

Liya James is a highly passionate, energetic, and engaging user experience designer, design thinking evangelist, advocate, coach, and facilitator. She is the kind of person you want in your organization and/or on your team who guides and empowers employees of all “ranks” to transform their business and/or day-to-day work from a traditional engineering-led to a design-led culture that delivers human-centric outcomes.

Uwe Zimmermann, Senior Product Design Manager, IBM

Liya and her team have worked with me on a number of different startups to research and validate product and market opportunities. Their strategic support was invaluable especially in the early stages of developing our ideas. The insights enabled us to make rapid decisions on how to move forward with our business ideas when it really mattered.

Liya is able to quickly understand your business needs, parse the essence of the problem you're dealing with, identify creative solutions, guide you through a process to flesh them out, and then communicate it in a way that makes it seem so simple that you wonder how you missed it all along. I have worked with her in each startup I've been a part of and will surely continue to do so in the future. I can't recommend her highly enough.