Our Team
Eric Morrow - Founder, Design strategist
Eric is a facilitator, instructor, and author. He loves to partner with fellow leaders eager to use Design Thinking to solve complex problems in the world and in their organizations, and write about his experiences in clear language that democratizes learning.
His work has focused on the challenges of innovation in large corporations, including Fortune 100 companies like Capital One, Walmart, and Google. He is most alive when working with teams applying quality user data to impactful product decisions. He is a human-centered educator, and has taught with General Assembly, the University of Oklahoma, and CU Boulder. In education he continues applying and advocating for innovation, specifically experimental and data-driven approaches. At IBM he led design thinking projects that aligned executive teams and engaged essential customers. Eric’s past lives were as a marketer, which he wrote a book about, and a lawyer, which he didn’t.
His Staircase Strategy friends look to him for ski-lift conversations, online dog training and access to a life-long puppy, and a reminder to take life one day at a time.
Hadassah Damien - Founder, Design strategist
Hadassah is a strategist, technologist, and facilitator deeply rooted in progressive finance, civic tech, and DEI. She solves meaningful problems with groups by leveraging design thinking, speculative games, agile methods, participatory pedagogy, empathy, and nonviolent communication.
When not working with nonprofit organizations to solve the social side of financials through her financial strategy and coaching business, Ride Free Fearless Money, Hadassah uses her unique blend of skillsets to create intersectional and and collaborative interventions in economic, technology, and cultural narratives. Her civic work includes projects with the City of Dubai (NDA), New York City (MODA & City Council), Greensboro and Oakland's City Councils. She’s partnered with researchers from Stanford and U Chicago, and presented widely from SXSW and Lesbians Who Tech Mtl, to Yale, MIT, Duke, UT Austin, NYU, Hampshire the New School and many more. She writes prolifically about all of the aforementioned topics, and more.
Her Staircase Strategy friends look to her for anything that has numbers, a great story, and everything they’d ever want to know about Dolly Parton.
Naveen Raja - Founder, Design strategist
Naveen is a design thinking and strategy facilitator, and entrepreneur. He is passionate about how people, places and cultures intermix and the significance it can play on creating an experience. His design journey has allowed him to vision, scope and scale in-person and remote facilitation programs for companies both large and small.
Naveen studied Industrial and Product Design before diving headfirst into Design Strategy, Visual Design, and Design Thinking. His work running Educate and Iterate taught him the value of seeking opportunities over problems, and honed his approach to strategy, pulling from various design and product development methods. Through helping various teams, including those at Mars, TripActions, USAA, ConsenSys, The World Bank, SAP, IBM, Fidelity Investments, Citibank, Marriott Hotels, he is perfecting his recipe for how to help people to achieve more by using design.
His Staircase Strategy friends look to him for delicious food recipes, jokes, and any analogies they might need.
Deepa Iyer - Design Strategist
Deepa is a Design Thinker, facilitator and instructor. She strives to create engaging user experiences with a curiosity to understand users and inferring their unarticulated needs. She brings people together to collectively imagine what is possible and co-create the future.
Her journey into the world of Design has given her the opportunity to facilitate innovation projects for large enterprise customers, deliver design-led strategy sessions for HR teams, co-design and develop curriculums and learning materials on user-centered design approaches and practices for organizations to shift to a design-driven culture, develop strategy and programming for design-minded communities of practice, and craft and deliver learning and development Strategies and programming for Design teams within organizations. Deepa has worked at and with multiple teams at SAP, Dropbox, LinkedIn and Palantir.net.
She is passionate about Design Strategy, facilitation, learning design and design-led organizational transformation.
Ryann Hoffman - Founder, Design strategist
Ryann is a systems designer and a strategy leader. Her work focuses on complexity design, service and business design, innovation leadership, designing remote collaborative experiences, design strategy, innovation operations, and capacity building in design methods.
She’s most in flow working in complex problem spaces, and has led design work across industries and at organizations including The World Bank and The Government of Madagascar, Capital One, Johns Hopkins Sibley Memorial Hospital, and ConsenSys. She’s a Civic Design coach and instructor for Mayors and city leaders around the country, working with Bloomberg Philanthropies and Harvard University to support cities in applying Human-Centered Design to solve resident challenges. Her circuitous route to this calling includes her Masters in Public Administration, a stint in the music industry, and many early years thinking she’d become a lawyer (she didn’t, sorry dad), working in and around basic legal rights and Sociology of law.
Her Staircase Strategy friends look to her for redesigning their home offices, packing only a carry-on for months of travel, and calm through the chaos.