Design Thinking for Breakthrough Innovation

True innovation is not just about ‘problem solving,’ it is about ‘problem finding’ – uncovering opportunities that haven’t yet been considered, or been possible. SAP Leonardo unlocks many of these opportunities, and design thinking as a creative methodology is at the heart of it.  Hear from SAP’s Chief Design Officer how the user-centered process -- and lessons SAP has learned along the way -- help customers expand the number of possible solutions, accelerate the time from concept to launch, and deliver game-changing value.  

Speaker:

Maricel Cabahug, Chief Design Officer, SAP

Speaker Bio:

Maricel Cabahug is a member of the senior executive team of SAP SE, the world’s market leader for business software. She is SAP’s Chief Design Officer and Global Head of SAP Design and leads SAP’s design organization with a determined focus on delivering the best user experience to customers, working closely with development and product leaders, and overseeing SAP’s Fiori Product Management. Maricel’s organization is passionate about co-innovation with customers to realize greater business value through technology that works for people. She maintains an unwavering commitment to the company’s vision of helping the world run better and improving people’s lives.

Maricel is a software engineer turned thought leader in design and user experience. Before being appointed to the role of Chief Design Officer she was the Senior Vice President and Head of Global Design and Fiori Product Management at SAP. After joining SAP in 2011 as VP of Solution Architecture, she later became Chief of Staff for the Chief Design Officer. Within the CDO office, she was promoted multiple times to her current role. As Chief Design Officer Maricel is currently responsible for SAP’s overall design strategy, the product design, and she leads an organization of over 670 employees. 

Before joining SAP, Maricel worked for Yaskawa, where she grew from an application developer to the CIO of the company.

Maricel combines her knowledge and experience in mathematics, computer science, and business with her curiosity to constantly learn new things and her passion to improve how people work. Her career spans more than 25 years in the IT sector, including leadership positions across APJ, North America, and Europe.  

Being a multi-passionate intrapreneur, she is defining a completely new market category of Enterprise Artificial Intelligence with her team’s latest product, SAP CoPilot, a digital assistant and bot-integration hub for the enterprise. 

She is married to a technologist and has a daughter who’s also a technologist. Maricel splits her time between the USA and Germany. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer science from the Ateneo De Manila University in Manila (Philippines). She has an MBA from Lake Forest Graduate School of Management (Illinois, USA) where she graduated with honors and completed the program for high performers at the Harvard Business School.