—- making awesome products with the most talented people
I’m overdue a headshot photoshoot!
Hi, I’m Irna.
I conceptualize and create products, systems and experiences that are both—human centered and business outcome driven.
With a background in product management, strategic design and software business, I’ve led innovation initiatives at startups and with legacy companies in industries across education, healthcare, financial data, telecom, satellite connectivity, automotive and industrial automation engineering.
I recently led shaping a strategic roadmap that contributed to a client company securing $60M in private equity funding for implementation.
I’ve also been adjunct faculty at Parsons School of Design Strategies leading courses on Innovation, Venture Design and Creative Team Dynamics.
When I’m not soaking sun in a San Francisco park, I’m traveling across the world, making weird art projects, playing around with all kinds of new software to make art, small videos and such or hoarding books that I’m eager to read but slow at consuming.
MY journey (so far):
2015-2016
I unlearned the world as it was taught to me creating educational programs for minority communities
Very early in my career, I had an unlearning experience. As part of a project with the United Nations, I was designing health-education material for adolescent girls in a small village in Rajasthan, India who had never been to school. I drew a 5-pointed-edge figure, filled it in yellow and said “a star!”. They looked at me perplexed like “Are you okay? What is this?”. One of them then grabbed crayons, colored a dark background and added white dots, “a star!” she said. She had never been to school, she was never taught how to draw a five pointed edge star like I was. She drew stars in their raw reality. That moment changed my life.
Every single day since then, I have worked on unlearning the world as it was taught to me.
On breaking down and understanding my most concrete mental models, and on leveraging the dialogue between my mind, heart and gut in my processes to build better futures.
We designed and tested visual teaching material with adolescent girls in Rajasthan
The material focused on explaining reproductive and menstrual health that are taboo topics in suburban India (well and urban too..)
2016-2018
ILed the pilot and scale of health education programs for seven health conditions that are operational across 35+ hospitals, reaching over 2 million individuals and reducing medical complications at home by up to 70%
Noora Health is a Stanford Extreme start-up that educates at-risk patients and caregivers in hospitals on post-discharge care to improve health outcomes. This could be a defining what care looks like for a prematurely born baby, for a person undergoing chemotherapy or for a cardiac patient healing from intensive surgery. I collaborated with data scientists, policy experts, doctors, nurses, patients, their caregivers, hospital staff and government officials to research, design, develop and scale programs that reduced complications in patients by up to 70 %. What I am most proud of is that I formed cross-team processes that Noora still works with today.
2018-2021
in addition to pursuing my ms, I brought my skills in design, business and technology together TO CREATE and scale meaningful products
I earned two scholarships to attend MS Strategic Design & Management at Parsons School of Design.
I was also a fellow at the Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative there.
With Yurgosky, I led the strategy, design and launch of Turnout, a Salesforce solution for educational organizations that reduced attendance tracking time by 80%, now reaching 2M + students across the US.
At the Parsons Bachelor of Business Administration program, Developed and taught courses in Innovation, Venture Business Design, and Creative Team Dynamics, instructing over 350 students in the Bachelor of Business Administration program.
Yurgosky: Turnout was featured at the Salesforce Dreamforce’19 conference under the “Innovation in HigherEd“ category
At Parsons, I lead students through their projects in combining design research methodologies with innovation strategy to forecast future scenarios and deliver creative business solutions. I also teach folks how to manage calendars, their time and energies and write strong emails :)
I was awarded a scholarship and selected to be at the Impact Entrepreneurship fellowship based on an idea I pitched about health-education pharmacy systems in India
2021-2023
my career and i rapidly grew through some tough and great times. I grew in my role and responsibilities at work while navigating extremely stressful visa circumstances and my sisters second cancer diagnosis
At Globant, I Led a cross-functional team to create and execute product strategy for a leading transaction data fintech company resulting in securing $60M in private equity funding.
Orchestrated business development deals exceeding $10M by engaging in strategic discovery and experience vision definition engagements with executives for top-tier companies. I rapidly grew into Lead and Senior Lead roles managing projects and scaling agile pods.
I secured the O-1 visa by Demonstrating Extraordinary Ability in Product and Design Strategy Within The Field of Business
2024
I’m amidst some reinventing and am enjoying settling into my life in san francisco after the last 6 years in new york city!
“There are not enough words in the world that can explain how much I enjoyed having Irna as an instructor. In these very scary and lonely times, connectivity in the classroom is extremely rare and difficult, but Irna was the only instructor that I formed a connection with this semester and it’s all due to the care and time that she puts into her students. Not only did she provide so many office hour opportunities, but she was genuinely caring and considerate to work with me through personal problems that impeded on my schoolwork and it meant the absolute world. Hands down, one of the best instructors I’ve had while at Parsons.”
“Irna was an incredible teacher who provided a very engaging learning experience, even considering we were on Zoom and it was a 7PM class, I was still excited for class every week. She had engaging topics, homework, and assignments that made me feel prepared for entering the creative field. I have taken things that I’ve learned from this class and used it towards my professional development, and it has helped me in landing larger roles. Overall, I’m very grateful I took this class.”
“Irna is an exceptionally high growth individual that is ready to work hard to rise to any challenge. It was an absolute pleasure to have her on the team. During her tenure at Noora Health, where I acted as Co-Founder & Chief Design Officer, it was a no brainer to rapidly promote her - quickly going from a fellow on the team to Senior Designer leading much of our workstreams. She takes on an active role as a leader on teams with a deep well of self motivation. There are people on teams that raise blood pressure and there are members of teams that make it seem that anything is achievable - Irna is definitely the latter. I would work with her again in a heartbeat and I hope that we collaborate in the future.”
“Irna was super enthusiastic and empathetic, and taught with so much passion. I am very glad to have had her for this class, and this has been one of my favorite courses at Parsons, despite it being online.”
“I love how this class was structured. Working on 3 different projects throughout the semester that we were able to piggyback off of one to the other was super insightful and allowed me to really immerse myself in the work. Not only were the projects really fun, but the way that each week we had to turn in a deliverable let me manage my time and make it easy to just combine and turn it at the end.”
“Irna is great at facilitating conversation instead of just lecturing over the class, she really calls for participation and conversation which made this class all the more effective.
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