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Celonaut Spotlight: Gabriela Lembo, Specialist UX Designer, Munich
What makes working in the Product Department at Celonis such a unique experience?
Working in a dynamic environment, with highly collaborative and brilliant people from varied backgrounds is super exciting. Each team and individual own their piece of the pie, which provides a unique opportunity to experiment, learn something new every day, and push and challenge yourself. It is also an enriching experience to work on transformational solutions that impact companies worldwide. I am also grateful to witness firsthand the impact and benefits our product provides to our clients. It is very rewarding to know that what we do on a daily basis allows Celonis to create tremendous value and, therefore, enable our clients to capture such value like never before.
What makes you proud?
Being part of such a groundbreaking company that has built a product which empowers businesses all over the world to become more efficient and ultimately more sustainable by unlocking capacity and having a bigger societal impact on the long run. It is also highly motivating to work at a bootstrapped unicorn that started with three university students, an ambitious idea, an amazing technology, and a belief that they could do things differently. Super excited to continue growing together with the company and being a game changer for our customers.
Which advice would you give to less experienced talents who are just starting their career?
Keep learning, be open, and be curious. Push and challenge yourself every day — motivation comes from within. Have accountability and extreme ownership, this is the only way to improve yourself. Think where you want to be, what's your goal ten years from now, and draw a plan on how to get there; we have to break big goals into small tangible steps. Last but not least, force serendipity and focus on continuous improvement.
Now, a bit more specific to UX/UI Designers: In the beginning, focus on the basics, so you have a good and solid foundation to build upon — typography, color theory, layout design, information visualization, design thinking, HCI —, pay attention to design, and surround yourself with it.
Which key qualifications should applicants have to join the Product Department?
To join the product department, applicants should have:
An entrepreneurial mindset — take ownership, be fearless, be ambitious.
A collaborative mentality — our team, culture, and shared values are the most valuable assets of our daily work.
Adaptability — be able to adapt to change.
Growth mindset.
Specifically for UX/UI designers, applicants should have a degree in Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design, Visual Design, or equivalent educational background. Experience in building saas is a huge plus.
What challenges do you face every day and how do you deal with them?
A big challenge that I faced was finding a way to integrate a more robust user-centric approach to my team's product development process. Through a design thinking approach, a solution-driven mindset, and collaboration with my team, we build a solution for it. We deployed a process improvement initiative, which unlocked a lot of value and resulted in higher collaboration, transparency, and overall productivity.
To learn more about this initiative, you can read the following article: here (—> Unlocking value by integrating UX Design in Development Sprints — a distributed leadership approach!)
Describe your team at Celonis in three words.
Collaborative, smart, and hard workers.
Tell us your personal story about living the Celonis values.
The initiative we deployed (mentioned above) is a great example about how we live 3 of the Celonis values:
Live for Customer Value — making sure that our Customers are at the center of everything we do.
The Best Team Wins — the crucial point that enabled us to implement such initiative was that we did it together. We approached our challenge in a transformational manner, transforming the way we were working together, addressed silos, and increased collaboration and transparency.
We own it — embraced a challenge with a problem-solving mindset with a collaborative ambition to become the best we can be, keeping evolving, learning, being accountable and having ownership.
Last but not least:
Earth is Our Future — I truly believe that our product is key to help our customers have more sustainable processes. By being committed to push our product to higher standards every day and support our academic alliance to spread the word, I believe that our product can ultimately have a tremendous impact on people’s lives, and the planet.
Gabriela joined Celonis as a UX Designer more than a year ago. She started her career as a fashion designer, having worked in different positions, and later added a post-graduate in Business Administration to increase her managerial toolbox. She also launched her own company and knew the nuts and bolts of entrepreneurship. More recently, Gabriela spent almost a decade in the world’s design capital, New York, where she got her Graphic Design degree at Parsons The New School and worked at leading agencies, start-ups, and Fortune 500 companies.
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