Alumni Portraits

The company culture first and foremost. I work with some of the nicest, most brilliant people in the world. I was also attracted to the ability to shape the way I work, and influence multiple stakeholders at all levels across the organization.

There is no typical day which keeps the work exciting and engaging! At one point, I could be working on a major communications initiative, at another creating a strategy to empower our managers to foster inclusive teams and cultures and end the day by conducting an analysis on how best to measure our key results.

I’m glad that in some ways Google was ahead of the curve and had already been pushing for conversations around racial awareness in the U.S. 2020 helped us to better leverage the strength of allyship and build a deep sense of belonging and community— not only here in America but globally.

Lippincott helped me in several ways — to think expansively, be laser focused on providing the best client outcomes, navigate complexity where there isn’t one “right answer” and craft compelling narratives and experiences that inspire.

At Facebook, we’re really big into servant leadership. We talk about “supporting teams” instead of leading them. So it might surprise people that in my job, I’m rarely actually designing anything. My day-to-day consists of supporting a team of incredible designers. So instead of getting too deep into pixels, I spend most of my time setting the team up for success, then getting out of their way.

One of the best parts of working at Facebook is the scale at which you have impact. Billions of people use our products! That comes with heavy responsibility that we take very seriously. The goal is to give people the power to build community. On Messenger, that means focusing on the highest impact ways to help people feel closer together, even when they’re apart. To break down that idea into actionable features and products, we do a lot of deep research.

At Microsoft, I was so lucky to work on a team that was focused on the future of computing via a head-mounted computer called HoloLens. Essentially, you wear a computer on your face and can see holograms mixed into the world that look just like all the physical objects you’re seeing. An early research finding from this program was that HoloLens was more impactful for enterprise scenarios (i.e., for factory workers) than for consumers (i.e., for gaming). Knowing that, we were able to build apps that helped technicians get remote help from experts around the world and apps that gave on-the-job training to help re-skill workers.

There are so many! A highlight has to be the ‘Like Me’ exhibition championed by Heather Stern. With an insanely talented Lippincott team, we concepted, designed, produced and exhibited a full museum exhibition about pop-culture’s sub-conscious bond with brands. The first stop was the London Design Museum. On more than one occasion, Senior Partner, Lee Coomber deconstructed the meaning of the word “awesome” to explain how it didn’t accurately describe my cup of coffee or the action items from our meeting. When Lee and I first stepped into the final exhibition at the Design Museum, he turned to me: “This Lauren, is awesome.” Such a proud moment for Lippincott that I’ll forever be grateful to have been part of.

I design technology-based tools that empower organizations to design and improve experiences for their customers, employees, brands or products. My job is to make sure that we have our customers’ needs in mind in all decisions we make as we build those tools.

I currently lead our automation workflow products at Qualtrics, aka xFlow. One recently-launched offering allows customers to build from a wide range of pre-configured workflows, making it easier to take action on any experience gaps in their organization. You never have to solve the same issue twice!

We document what makes a product successful and how we plan to measure it in the discovery and definition stages of the product development cycle. It’s often tied to a specific business goal that ladders up to larger company-wide initiatives.

The pandemic brought people online for everything from buying groceries to seeing a doctor. It has become increasingly important to practice inclusive design and make sure the products we create are fully accessible to everyone. Our fast-growing team has been learning and documenting accessibility design this past year.

Lippincott taught me to be rigorous in the design process and deliver the best quality work possible; at the end of the day, what’s delivered needs to work well, look good and feel right.

I was traveling in San Francisco as an entrepreneur working on various tech start-up projects, and I stayed in a nice Airbnb that was smartly turned into a co-working space during the daytime. I realized there was a terrible waste of under-used spaces in France with tremendous potential for being recycled into atypical and affordable workspaces. As we were surrounded by collaborative initiatives everywhere, I had this vision of an Airbnb for the daytime, an online collaborative marketplace allowing to answer these increasing needs through a disruptive offer and technology.

Our key differentiator is our unique model of recycling underused spaces that are not originally offices, leveraging innovative tech to match and scale. This leads us to a wide variety of atypical and highly humanized spaces anyone can book instantly, available everywhere, for the desired time.

Probably the time and perseverance required to get a business rolling, starting from scratch with no money. I was not expecting such a challenging adventure, so many ups and downs when I first decided to quit my job to dedicate myself to my own start-up. However, it’s worth the effort!

The complete rebranding of the Yves Rocher brand worldwide. It was a full spectrum brand strategy and design project taking into account a wide range of business functions. I was starting my career and I had the chance to work hand-in-hand with highly experienced Senior Partner, Denis Bonan.

I’m a writer. I’ve covered entertainment and culture for almost a decade, and I’ve written cover stories for Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar on Taylor Swift, Gwyneth Paltrow and more. Over the course of my career, I’ve covered events including the Emmys, the Grammys, the Golden Globes and New York Fashion Week. I’ve also contributed to the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal Magazine, W Magazine, Town & Country and Bon Appetit. I’m currently working on a few long-term writing projects, including a screenplay.

It’s tough for me to pick out just one person, as so many have stayed with me. Taylor Swift was very memorable, as she was my first cover story and a wonderful, engaging interview. I was able to chat with Prince Harry at a polo match in Orlando, where I was reporting a story for VF. It was after a charity event, and the encounter was decidedly casual, which made for a sort of a surreal conversation.

I’m always struck by how much of a difference it makes to hear scenes you’ve written read out loud by other people. Hearing an actor (or even a non-actor) recite a piece of dialogue you’ve written usually reveals its effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, in an immediately clarifying way, no matter how many times you’ve read it over in your own head beforehand.

Lippincott was an extremely formative workplace for me. It was my first job post-college, and I learned so much about concise communication and creative thinking, as well as the contours of office dynamics. I met so many brilliant people, and am lucky to still be in touch with many of them to this day. Brand consulting might seem like it would be a very different field than entertainment journalism, but I often think about the branding world when I’m approaching a profile, as almost every famous person functions, to some degree, as a brand, and I find it an instructive way to think about celebrity.

IVI is a non-profit international organization that discovers, develops and delivers vaccines against infectious diseases that predominantly affect low-and middle-income countries. From discovering new vaccines in the lab, developing them in clinical trials, conducting vaccination campaigns and studying their use in the real world, IVI is at every step of ensuring safe, effective and affordable vaccines are available to the people who need them most.

As the Global Communications & Media Specialist, I help develop all of our external communications including press releases, website, social media content and marketing materials while engaging with journalists and our partner organizations for joint campaigns.

In every way. I started working at IVI in September 2019, learning about science and risk communication on the job and digesting everything I could about vaccines. Our team was suddenly receiving multiple requests a day for media interviews with our scientists and we began taking a more proactive approach to providing thought leadership. We recently produced a video series called “Ask a Vaccine Expert: COVID-19” to share credible and accessible information about the pandemic and help dispel some of the circulating misinformation.

With the brand voice team, I certainly became a stronger strategic writer and carried with me a lot of the best practices that we advised to our clients—who, often, were communications teams. How to communicate with clarity, empathy and with a discernible voice. Lippincott trained me to look at communications critically and creatively, and that has been a huge asset for developing messages that are factually correct, easy to understand, memorable and repeatable.  

Overview is a curation of satellite and aerial imagery used to demonstrate how human activity and natural forces shape our Earth. The images are brought to life through daily posts on social media, products, brand collaborations and a series of books including Overview Timelapse: How We Change The Earth.

The project gets its name from an idea that I learned about in 2013 (in a space club I started at Lippincott called Lippinfinity!) known as the Overview Effect. This term refers to the sensation that astronauts experience when given the opportunity to look down and view the Earth as a whole, from a great distance. They have the chance to appreciate our home in its entirety, to reflect on its beauty and its fragility all at once. That’s the shift that I hope to inspire with my work.

The Overviews focus primarily on places where humans have impacted the landscape. I currently work with four different satellite and aerial imaging companies, along with two government space programs, to access the high-resolution imagery. I take their raw files and add my artistic touch to refine them as needed. If it is my goal to get my audience to pay attention to how our planet is changing, I need the images to look as good as possible, even if the content isn’t necessarily “positive” or “beautiful” in nature.

As I was shaping the initial idea for the project, I wrote “From the Earth’s surface it’s impossible to fully appreciate the beauty and intricacy of the things we’ve constructed, the sheer complexity of the systems we’ve developed, or the devastating impact that we’ve had on our planet.” Seven years later, this still holds true, and I hope with thousands of images created and dozens of projects completed, my audience has been changed by this new perspective. I know I certainly have.

Whether or not I realized it, from the very first days of starting Overview, I was building a brand. I often refer to my work as a “project,” but I also see it as a cohesive, yet evolving, mission-driven brand. In the first week of launching a website, I posted a mission statement to explain why the project existed, what it hoped to inspire. There’s no way I would have done that without my experience at Lippincott as this wasn’t too dissimilar from the brand houses I was regularly putting together for clients. Going forward, decisions about the brand’s visual system, logo, tone of voice or typeface (just to name a few!) were all influenced by what I learned from my colleagues at Lippincott.

Women in Innovation is an international non-profit organization working to close the gender gap in innovation. We provide programming, tools, resources and a high-impact community for women working in innovation across professional services firms, Fortune 500 corporations and the start-up ecosystem. I lead strategy and operations for the San Francisco Bay Area market working with our local and global leadership teams to manage volunteer staff and programs, drive community growth and create impact according to our mission.

Over my career, I’ve worked in innovation roles both on the consulting side, at places like IDEO, as well as in-house including stints at Chobani and a biotech startup focused on women’s health. I wanted to give back and use some of my experience to help women in innovation succeed. Beyond that, it was the brilliant women in WIN’s leadership team who I met along the way. It’s rare to have the opportunity to collaborate with others outside of our day jobs, yet so invaluable to have a community of women to learn from and be inspired by.

Innovation work inherently involves navigating a lot of ambiguity, including when it comes to career paths. Because professional trajectories in innovation are often less linear, women often have to advocate for themselves while forging their own way.

I’ve been fortunate to have so many incredible moments — from working with The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to rebrand birth control, to building out the healthcare and biotech branding practice at Wolff Olins and more recently starting my own studio.

Helping lead one of the first customer experience innovation projects for Conde Nast. And the people of course, like the fabulous Emma Cofer, Anne Kawalerski and Micheal D’Esopo.

Skin care feels a lot harder than it needs to be. I learned that after years of struggling with my skin. Figuring it all out was time consuming and disheartening. I founded Kura to make clean skin care effortless, enjoyable and accessible to everyone. Kura works as a skincare matchmaker: using a customer’s Skin Profile we analyze over a million skincare possibilities to connect each individual with the best clean products for their unique needs and budget, and those curations are always getting better.

For Kura, better ingredients are at the heart of everything. We only partner with brands whose products are non-toxic, cruelty-free and nutrient-dense. We also look for ones who are working to reduce their carbon footprint. But our true special sauce is our matchmaking. By using technology to individually match customers to skincare routines that adapt to their needs seasonally and over time we can reliably deliver better results. No other company is taking this approach.

For the vast majority of us this process is not glamorous. I was based out of Lippincott’s San Francisco office prior to starting Kura and there was always this hum of energy around startups and new businesses. But the day-to-day reality feels very different. It’s the highest of highs, but also the lowest of lows. There are far more no’s than yes’s. You need serious conviction and grit to muddle through, especially during the early days.

I think the future is very bright. Today, we use our system to match customers with such precision that the majority stay with us for a long time. I’m looking to further build out our inventory with a wider range of products to allow for more precise tailoring and even better results; that will also mean moving from operating exclusively as a retailer to also formulating but that’s a bit further down the line.

I remember long sessions in our San Francisco office really beating up and dissecting a strategy. To do that well I think you need patience and intellectual honesty and those are key as a founder. To succeed you’ll need to put aside your biases and really learn from customers in order to grow or maybe even pivot.

I’m Engineering Manager for the Find My app team, where I work on creating great iOS software for Apple and I also co-founded AirTag.

I believe software engineering is today’s most modern form of art and way to improve human evolution. Movies, books and other art forms of expression are experienced and enjoyed maybe once or a few times at most, but great software can be used daily and improve your quality of life. Plus, we can improve this over time making the impact dynamic. There are several articles online on how Find My has saved people’s lives based on its usage, and so many other impactful use cases.

I reference my time at Lippincott fondly and often. Lippincott’s lessons on brand identity and the beliefs behind the brand and sticking to the identity absolutely come into play when architecting great software. Giving that “life” to your work, complete with identity and all, has a powerful effect in decision making and aids in bringing to life your creations.

There are so many it’s hard to pick one, but Lippincott at many points felt like a family of really amazing people who have done and are doing amazing, high-profile work. We’d work hard together, rushing for that FedEx shipment to deliver a CD-ROM to FedEx by 7pm as an orchestrated team. We’d have great happy hours, and I’ve even made several lifelong friends through my time at Lippincott. Lippincott also really supercharged my software development career because they gave me the freedom to build the company’s first extranet, removing the need to get those CD’s to FedEx by 7pm.

I lead design teams working across three main areas: Kids, Family and Community; Product Tools; and Content Expression. I get to work closely with our Editorial, Growth, Product, Research and Engineering partners in highly collaborative, very fluid work streams. One of the things I love about my role is that I’m involved in both the aesthetic and heuristic aspects of the product experience. In other words, not just how our product works, but how it feels and how our voice comes to life in the experience.

Definitely. We’re trying to respect established streaming conventions while challenging ourselves to depart from them.

For example, we didn’t launch with user-selectable avatars, a feature other platforms have had for some time. When we were ready to add this feature, we decided to go a step further, and were the first in the competitive streaming landscape to offer people the option to upload their own photos.

Being the new kid on the block can feel like an opportunity to do things differently, to poke holes in established conventions. We don’t overwhelm users with row after row of endless thumbnails. We let our curatorial voice come through with a variety of components that are not only provocative and intriguing, but beautiful. We’re designing components that go beyond the traditional carousel, components that support content discovery through a variety of lenses and experiences.

To be a good product designer requires a kind of curiosity and compassion that isn’t discussed often enough. There are many bootcamp-style UX and Product Design programs teaching people how to create everything from user journeys to wireframes, but they’re missing the human component—the why, the motivation, the service aspect of our work. The best product designers I know didn’t start out to be product designers; they were drawn to the profession because they fell in love with making things others would find useful, meaningful and enjoyable. So my advice to the aspiring product designer would be to question your motivations. If they point toward an innate curiosity about people and a desire to serve them, keep going.

I loved working on the Bank of New York rebrand. The identity team, led by Connie Birdsall and Alex de Janosi, crafted a beautiful system that was simultaneously modern and historically reflective. Translating that identity to the Bank’s digital presence was a rewarding challenge.