Janko Jovanovic

Design Management
& Strategic Design

A seasoned design and product lead with nearly 30 years of experience across various fields. I bring together design management, product management, strategy, futures thinking, and systems thinking to help teams and organizations navigate an increasing uncertainty and design for the preferable future.

Summary for people in a hurry

  • Nearly 30 years of experience
  • 10 years in building, managing, and scaling cross-functional teams including product, design, research, and content design
  • 13 years in coaching and mentoring
  • Startup, agency, and corporate experience; B2B + B2C
  • Strong stakeholder management
  • Defining organizational, product, and CX vision and strategy
  • Facilitation of multidisciplinary, cross-organizational efforts
  • Applying business strategy, futures thinking, and systems thinking

60 seconds summary

(for those who are not in such a hurry)

Since 2023 I am working in Yara as a Senior Manager. I look after the User Experience organization that is responsible for building the Yara Digital Platform which serves multitude of users and stakeholders - from farmers to agronomists.

Prior to this, I worked at Zalando as a Product Design Manager. As part of the Fashion Store digital experience, I was responsible for the Product Design team focused on inspiration & engagement. In the more distant past, as the first product designer in Contentful, I lead strategic design efforts and helped the company to build the product, and grow design capabilities from scratch. Before joining Contentful, I co-owned a small service design consultancy, where I helped clients to define their strategies, and product and service offerings. That would sum up the last 15 years of my work. The rest is as ancient as Nokia 3310 and involves interface design, packaging design, engineering, Clipper '87, and software architecture.

I consider myself to be a pluralist and I feel comfortable working across boundaries of any kind. I’m exploring the crossroads of multiple disciplines, such as product management, service and experience design, speculative design, system thinking, strategic foresight, and ethics. All this makes me a generalist, but I do specialize in something — being comfortable with the unknown and being able to navigate uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

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