MEET OUR SPEAKERS
The Product & UX Design Stage [8 NOV], powered by Google, will bring together top experts catering to the UX/UI field, including product experts, researchers, writers, and many other experts from various domains, fostering innovation & creativity.
This playground extends its reach to both product design professionals and the IT industry, providing a space to explore cutting-edge UX/UI principles and their practical applications in personal or professional projects.
***Access to this stage was granted to those who were eligible for the event and filled out the dedicated form. Registrations for this stage are now closed.
Alexandra Pahomi
Marketing Manager Central Europe
Alexandra is Marketing Manager for Central Europe @ Google, with +15 years experience in building tech & software brands, leading teams and scaling businesses. Passionate about tech, wearables and getting things done, Alex started her career as Digital Manager for a San-Francisco start-up and continued her journey by opening her own marketing & PR company. For the last two years, she has been growing the Consumer & Retail strategy for Google wearables in Eastern Europe.
Lavinia Neagoe
Director of Engineering & Bucharest Technology Site Lead
Lavinia Neagoe is Director of Engineering & Bucharest Technology Site Lead at Google, with +15 years of experience in leading global engineering teams. Her mission is to drive excellence in building new technology for businesses and customers. Her ultimate goal is to impact people’s lives in a positive way through technology and innovation. Lavinia is also an active member of the business community, driving education initiatives and bringing in her passion for technology at a very early age. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Building lasting product success: Scale, Disruption and Renewal
Monica Alexandru
Product Manager
Monica is a Product Manager for Google Wearables, with a generalist background anchored in startup education and impact entrepreneurship. She asks “why?” a lot, and has joined Google with a simple mission: to help the world grow happier and healthier. She brings her vast experience in delivering digital products to this mission, with over 20 years spanning work in architecture, UX, events, marketing, business development & product management. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: How they failed - Learning from the products we loved, then forgot 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: An analysis of 3 case studies. Would pick generic products, with no actual brands, to avoid PR difficulties. ( eg: lava lamps, magazines ) Would talk about product life cycle, product-market fit and different root causes for each fall ( eg: changes in societal values, obviously technology, pandemic, competitors etc ).
Ilona Farkas
UX Researcher
With over 7 years of experience supporting B2B and B2C companies building and reshaping their products Ilona is a qualitative UXR working for Fitbit wearables and Google Pixel Watch. Driven by a natural curiosity about people, Ilona likes observing and understanding how they think, what their goals are and what is their motivation. She seeks to unravel the depths of the human mind through carefully built research processes, considering that doing all this in a methodic, analytical approach can help product teams build better products and experiences. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Uncovering the “Why” Before the “Yikes” - Scaling successful products with the help of UXR 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: How can UX research effectively support and amplify achievements, ensuring that your products reach their full potential to work well for an audience of billions?
Andra Bobaru
Technical Program Manager
Andra is a Technical Program Manager, with over 15 years of experience in banking large scale organizational transformations, delivering value towards internal and external customers. Her motto is “never stop learning”, but she is also passionate about understanding problems, breaking them into manageable pieces of complexity and then turning them into opportunities. In all her assignments, she contributed to creating business value and achieving program goals by acting as a bridge between cross functional, geographically distributed teams. Outside working hours, Andra will always enjoy a good book (especially if it is her children’s math school materials). 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Project Managers - an endangered species? 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: How will Project managers rise to the challenge and keep their leverage and importance within an org in the upcoming years?
Daniel Rizea
Director Software Engineering
With an experience of over 10 years in global tech companies and fast scaling international start-ups, Daniel Rizea is Director of Engineering in Google. Presently, he is managing a team of 90 engineers from the Bucharest and Mountain View offices, overseeing the development of features such as Sleep, Activity , Mental Health, Nutrition and Health Experiences on Google wearable devices. Daniel has also contributed strategically to the Fitbit App Strategy in the broader Google ecosystem. His team’s most recent accomplishments are launching a new Body Response sensor and experience with the Fitbit Sense 2 smartwatches and an innovative way of visualizing sleep patterns with the Sleep animal feature. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Panel: Helpdesk 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: What's your biggest challenge in building a successful product? Let us know and see what advice our experts can provide
Dragos Bardac
Senior Interaction Designer
Dragos Bardac is a Senior Interaction Designer, working at Google in Bucharest, where he is working on the user experience of Fitbit trackers. With an education in visual arts and an entrepreneurial background, Dragos co-founded a startup in the B2C space, roller coasting through the ups and downs of the challenging path of the startup adventure. He designed experiences for a wide range of devices, in a variety of industries, always aiming to create great products with exceptional user experience and a delightful user interface. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Panel: Helpdesk 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: What's your biggest challenge in building a successful product? Let us know and see what advice our experts can provide
Daniel Chis
Product Manager
Daniel is a Product Manager, working at Google from Bucharest. Daniel leads the experience of managing Google’s first party devices: from the Pixel Watch to Fitbit Wearables. With years of experience in the tech industry, working on both B2B and B2C products, Daniel has worked on products all across the industry, from gaming to banking, analytics, health and consumer devices. Currently Daniel is focused on solving complex problems in order to change the way we interact with wearables. Passion is what defines his work and the teams he partners with. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Panel: Helpdesk 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: What's your biggest challenge in building a successful product? Let us know and see what advice our experts can provide
Ana Velicaru
Product Manager
Ana is a product manager on the FitbitOS team, with a focus on delivering great health & fitness experiences for Fitbit wearables. She has a background in mathematics, which she considers to be very useful for understanding how to solve product issues and having a data focused lens through which one should glance. Ana truly feels PMing is both a career and an extension to her day to day life, since she’s always been a jack of all trades: fostering a thousand hobbies while not actually being a connoisseur of any. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Little by Little - The Power of Incremental Changes 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: Everything in the world seems to be happening at once. As artificial intelligence instruments evolve in the direction of automating processes and bringing cohesive flows in the day to day, it is easily understandable why everyone is all hands on deck to build the next great thing. And then the next. And the next. But not all great things are necessarily … intelligent! (pun intended). Delivering useful products to customers is a process where simple changes can significantly impact quality by simplifying tasks. This is what this presentation is about.
Alina Vizitiu
Product Manager
Alina is Working as a Program Manager with the Fitbit trackers team. In her role she is coordinating projects alongside design leads, creating and implementing processes, enabling better communications between stakeholders. She believes that Structure and Clarity are the pillars for success and enjoys developing process and operational support so designers can focus on creating spectacular products. Her background in Advertising and planning large scale events taught her resilience, the importance of communication and just how amazing it is when it all comes together. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Project Managers - an endangered species? 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: Making an impact in an ever changing, potentially automated environment is challenging. How will Project managers rise to the challenge and keep their leverage and importance within an org in the upcoming years?
Cera Radu
Interaction Designer
Cera is an Interaction Designer, based in Bucharest, focusing on building experiences on both smartwatches and trackers. She studied architecture and has 10+ years experience working as a designer in e-learning, gaming, mobile apps and wearables, trying to bring the “fun” element in user’s digital experiences. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Workshop
Andreea Dina
Interaction Designer
Andreea is an Interaction Designer, based in Bucharest, currently working at Google. Her focus is on defining frameworks that scale across multiple platforms. Over the years she touched upon a broader range of areas - from highly technical to well-being experiences. Nonetheless, all products are a matter of interpretation and perception, thus creating a great responsibility for designers. Andreea graduated from National University of Arts in Bucharest, where she has a degree in Visual Arts. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Workshop
Andrei Timofticiuc
Staff Software Engineer
Andrei, Staff Software Engineer at Google, has over 12 years of software development experience and showed that he is always curious to see what's under the hood of software systems. He is specialised in iOS development, having worked on projects from small startups all the way to large scale businesses used daily by millions of users. He is a certified cat lover and part time musical artist. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Panel: Helpdesk