Speaking & Workshops
I speak with product and design teams, executive leaders, conferences, and university programs about customer experience, design leadership, organizational transformation, and the changing role of creativity in an AI-enabled world. My talks draw from the practical realities of leading design and product work inside large organizations, with an emphasis on ideas people can apply to their own teams and decisions.
Available Topics
Creativity in the Age of AI
Designing What Comes Next
AI is dramatically shortening the distance between an idea and its execution. This talk explores what that shift means for creativity, design, and product leadership when teams can explore more possibilities and make them tangible much earlier. I focus on where human judgment becomes more important, how AI can expand rather than narrow creative exploration, and what teams can do to make better decisions about what is worth building.
Transforming CX at Enterprise Scale
Lessons from growing customer-centered product and design practices from one pilot to 250+ teams
What does it take to scale a successful customer-centered model without losing what made it work? I share lessons from helping grow multidisciplinary product and design practices from an early pilot to more than 250 teams. The session explores how priorities, talent, shared practices, principles, and leadership itself had to evolve so teams could make strong customer-centered decisions with greater autonomy.
Design with Intention
Move Hearts. Shape Minds. Change Behavior.
Every experience makes some actions easier, some harder, and signals what deserves our attention. In this talk, I explore how behavioral science can help designers understand the forces shaping people’s decisions and make more deliberate choices about the experiences they create. The goal is not to push people toward an outcome, but to better understand friction, motivation, context, and the behaviors we are trying to support.
Crafting a Client-Centered Vision
Define your product strategy and make the future tangible.
Teams can have roadmaps, priorities, and plenty of ideas without sharing a clear picture of the experience they are trying to create. This session explores how future-state experience visions can connect customer insight with product strategy and give multidisciplinary teams something concrete to align around. I share practical approaches for creating the vision collaboratively and using it to improve decisions as work moves from strategy into delivery.
Venture Design: From Idea to Impact
New ideas often raise an immediate question: should we build the capability ourselves, invest in something new, or partner with someone who can help us move faster? In this session, I use three venture models to help teams think more deliberately about that decision. The approach connects customer opportunity, organizational capability, and the realities of bringing a new idea to market.
Custom Topics
I also develop sessions for teams, classrooms, and leadership groups around related questions, including:
- Growing from design craft into broader leadership and influence
- What it means to be a strategic designer
- Building stronger partnerships across design, product, and engineering
- Structuring and developing design teams in large organizations
- Creating better critique, feedback, and decision-making practices
Testimonials
Laurie ChurchmanPrincipal of Designlore | Educator
Gavin brings an enviable amount of design leadership expertise, actionable advice and humble humor to each classroom talk. Students are eager for his timely insights and love engaging in a lively Q&A!
Maribeth Kradel-WeitzelProfessor and Assistant Provost, Thomas Jefferson University
Gavin is a dynamic speaker who easily combines his considerable professional expertise with the engaging and approachable presentation style of an experienced educator. His passion for mentoring is evident in his desire to thoughtfully customize content to meet learners where they are. His presentations provide relevant skills and new ways of thinking that inspire positive change.
Eric KarnesAssociate Professor, Drexel University
As both a professional and educator, Gavin has long been a master at bridging the (too-often disconnected) fields of business strategy, user interaction, and design. In his speaking, his humor and approachable style bely a serious expertise–chock full of practical and actionable insights for students and colleagues alike.