Mercedes-Benz R&D

Project Background

My team and I worked in partnership with the Mercedes-Benz R&D group on multiple initiatives focused on leveraging design thinking and human-centered approaches for innovation, process improvement, and culture change.

Approach

We conducted internal workshops to identify opportunities for cultural and workflow improvements, and we carried out market user research to uncover unmet and underserved needs that informed a series of innovation workshops, both for capability building and actual output.

Outcome

We introduced new methodologies and ways of working that helped the team expand their toolkit and strengthen capabilities in product ideation, concept development, executive buy-in, and cross-functional collaboration.

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.

Matt Garmur, Product Manager, Meta

Seth Blaustein, Founder & CEO, Dollar Donation Club