True inno­va­tion is not just about ​‘prob­lem solv­ing,’ it is about ​‘prob­lem find­ing’ – uncov­er­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that haven’t yet been con­sid­ered, or been pos­si­ble. SAP Leonar­do unlocks many of these oppor­tu­ni­ties, and design think­ing as a cre­ative method­ol­o­gy is at the heart of it. Hear from SAP’s Chief Design Offi­cer how the user-cen­tered process — and lessons SAP has learned along the way — help cus­tomers expand the num­ber of pos­si­ble solu­tions, accel­er­ate the time from con­cept to launch, and deliv­er game-chang­ing value. 

Speak­er:

Mari­cel Cabahug, Chief Design Offi­cer, SAP

Speak­er Bio:

Mari­cel Cabahug is a mem­ber of the senior exec­u­tive team of SAP SE, the world’s mar­ket leader for busi­ness soft­ware. She is SAP’s Chief Design Offi­cer and Glob­al Head of SAP Design and leads SAP’s design orga­ni­za­tion with a deter­mined focus on deliv­er­ing the best user expe­ri­ence to cus­tomers, work­ing close­ly with devel­op­ment and prod­uct lead­ers, and over­see­ing SAP’s Fiori Prod­uct Man­age­ment. Maricel’s orga­ni­za­tion is pas­sion­ate about co-inno­va­tion with cus­tomers to real­ize greater busi­ness val­ue through tech­nol­o­gy that works for peo­ple. She main­tains an unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment to the company’s vision of help­ing the world run bet­ter and improv­ing people’s lives.

Mari­cel is a soft­ware engi­neer turned thought leader in design and user expe­ri­ence. Before being appoint­ed to the role of Chief Design Offi­cer she was the Senior Vice Pres­i­dent and Head of Glob­al Design and Fiori Prod­uct Man­age­ment at SAP. After join­ing SAP in 2011 as VP of Solu­tion Archi­tec­ture, she lat­er became Chief of Staff for the Chief Design Offi­cer. With­in the CDO office, she was pro­mot­ed mul­ti­ple times to her cur­rent role. As Chief Design Offi­cer Mari­cel is cur­rent­ly respon­si­ble for SAP’s over­all design strat­e­gy, the prod­uct design, and she leads an orga­ni­za­tion of over 670 employees. 

Before join­ing SAP, Mari­cel worked for Yaskawa, where she grew from an appli­ca­tion devel­op­er to the CIO of the company.

Mari­cel com­bines her knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence in math­e­mat­ics, com­put­er sci­ence, and busi­ness with her curios­i­ty to con­stant­ly learn new things and her pas­sion to improve how peo­ple work. Her career spans more than 25 years in the IT sec­tor, includ­ing lead­er­ship posi­tions across APJ, North Amer­i­ca, and Europe. 

Being a mul­ti-pas­sion­ate intrapre­neur, she is defin­ing a com­plete­ly new mar­ket cat­e­go­ry of Enter­prise Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence with her team’s lat­est prod­uct, SAP CoPi­lot, a dig­i­tal assis­tant and bot-inte­gra­tion hub for the enterprise. 

She is mar­ried to a tech­nol­o­gist and has a daugh­ter who’s also a tech­nol­o­gist. Mari­cel splits her time between the USA and Ger­many. She grad­u­at­ed with a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in Math­e­mat­ics and Com­put­er sci­ence from the Ate­neo De Mani­la Uni­ver­si­ty in Mani­la (Philip­pines). She has an MBA from Lake For­est Grad­u­ate School of Man­age­ment (Illi­nois, USA) where she grad­u­at­ed with hon­ors and com­plet­ed the pro­gram for high per­form­ers at the Har­vard Busi­ness School.