Christina Humpf is a Product & Design Leader, Senior Manager, based in Munich.
She directed interdisciplinary teams across a wide range of digital product development initiatives and integrated businesses through expertise in delivering optimal user experiences, collaborative designs, and experience strategies. For 13 years, Christina’s work experience reaches from working in innovation companies, self-employed, creative agencies, digital business transfomation consultancies and latest internationally for one of the best known management & IT consultancies.
Christina is currently leading a lovely product design team in a boutique SaaS company.
Leading change-oriented, inclusive and visually characterizes Christina’s strategic way of working to this day.
Christina and her efforts are standing for Experience, Product and Service Design, UX Conception, UX Strategy, Consulting and Digital Transformation to connect user desires with company needs. Her hybrid talent is driven by big questions, taking on complex challenges and building strategy and digital products within cross-team collaboration and a well maintained stakeholder partnership. Christina’s favorite works are based on a healthy unit organization, an open communication style, and a diverse mixture of disciplines, skills and excessive curiosity & engagement.
In this ideal world, structure and empathy come together by using a sparring: Christina provides leadership, management consulting, support for creative & product teams and set the example for creative excellence by both doing and leading. She is highly engaged in creating an environment where people want to work, learn and thrive, and most importantly, a space in which everyone feels respected and enabled.
One important quality is her fearlessness and commitment regarding change, which she embraces as an opportunity to innovate and create solutions that matter to business and people.
Christina. Behind a name, profession and title.
You in five words…
That’s hard. I’m in love with details. 🙂 But today it’s:
Transparency – Idealism – Thinker – Plan – Self-awareness
Your dream job as a child…
Vet or psychologist. And a pro-puzzler. I wanted to help all animals, because they cannot speak for themselves and their needs. And I wanted to be a psychologist, because I felt that communication and feelings are not easy to frame, but should follow at least some rules.
How do you get to UX Design?
About 13 years ago the job „UX Designer“ didn’t even exist, at that time you were a concepter and most of us did not design plattforms or software. I started within communication design partly in print. And I quickly realized, that there is a thin line between „advertising and marketing“ and design as a strategy (Corporate Design, Design Strategy, Art Direction and so on). Turns out, that only Visual Graphic Design was not enough for me: I was driven by frameworks, services and communication internal and external.
I felt, the meta-level could be a better fit for me: I wanted to meet client needs, I wanted to know, if our output generate value and how we could measure that. I was driven by Design as a Service, Design as part of Communication and how to shape processes leaner. Digitalisation was also an enabler: since the term „UX Design“ was born, I was working as hybrid UX Designer in digital product developments. Today I guide, debrief, work as a Collaboration Design Lead between product teams, shape digital visions, ideate, test and learn from users. I am finally creating environments, where we have to ask relevant questions and uncover problems and design accordingly 🙂
Your most hated buzzword…
Actually it’s the phrase „Great momentum“! Yes – A pitch win, contract sign or a feature completion is a moment to hold on for a second and celebrate the hard work, but that should come from the team and not by one team-/work-external leadership person.
I also do not believe in the myth of award-winning billion dollar ideas, holy pitch decks AND the success of it. It needs more than ONE moment to set up resilient project flows, perform on continuous improvements, providing business strategies, built on client partnerships; in short it needs to have whole team (and also clients) to deliver a successfull project win.
In addition, the expression is unfortunately used inflationarily, even when nothing has happened yet.
What are you nerdy about?
Graphic design, typography, plants, cats, coffee, Post-its, stamps, organisation structures, coloured socks and nails, InDesign, communication design, learning and mentoring e.g. at Toastmaster Sessions, as a People Manager or while leading workshops, trainings and brownbags or enabling communities and growing junior colleagues.
You want to get in touch? You would like to send feedback?
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