DATE: 2024-2025
EVENT: Wells Fargo Design Day (Annual Gathering, Menlo Park Innovation Center).
ROLE: Ideator, executive alignment, fundraising, and lead organizer.
IMPACT: Revived broad design gatherings after a nine-year hiatus (the last broad event was in 2015). Activated the newly opened Menlo Park campus as a creator hub, brought 120+ Bay Area designers together annually across six siloed lines of business, curated keynotes with outside design leaders, ran all-together design sprints, and established recurring funding for a multi-year community.
The last broad design gathering anyone remembered happened in 2015
Inside an institution with more than 200,000 employees, design teams naturally end up compartmentalized. Designers in Commercial Digital (Vantage), Mobile Growth, Wealth, Innovation Enablement, Branch Transformation, and conversational AI assistants like Fargo rarely shared a hallway, let alone a workspace. Post-pandemic hybrid routines hardened those divisions. While everyone was solving complex interaction, regulatory, and systems challenges, most teams were solving them in isolation.
I proposed and led the creation of Design Day: a full-day, annual summer summit hosted at Wells Fargo’s Innovation Center in Menlo Park.
The initial launch solved an immediate strategic problem. The Menlo Park Innovation Center had just opened its doors in May, representing a significant corporate investment that leadership needed to justify. New corporate spaces often sit pristine and underutilized because teams are hesitant to claim them. Design Day served as the physical catalyst to activate the facility. By packing 120+ creators into every workshop room, maker lab, and amphitheater tier, we gave the space immediate purpose, proved the return on investment to executive sponsors, and showed designers that this campus was a working home base they could leverage for their own projects.
Coalition Building: Making It an Annual Institution
An event of this scale does not happen through top-down mandates in banking. It requires coalition building and shared financial ownership.
Rather than running it as a single-team showcase, I partnered with design directors across lines of business to pitch the value of community, peer learning, and cross-pollination. We secured shared funding and executive sponsorship across six distinct groups: Innovation Enablement, Mobile Growth & Strategy, Commercial Digital Design (Vantage), Branch Systems & Transformation, Fargo AI, and Experience Design (XD).
Because every group contributed budget, every group had skin in the game. The success of the 2024 launch cemented executive trust, earning recurring multi-year funding to establish Design Day as an annual tradition. By 2025, the model began inspiring design leaders in regional hubs like Charlotte and New York to plan connected gatherings.
Outside Voices: Bringing in Industry Perspectives
To prevent the summit from becoming an internal echo chamber, we kicked off each year with featured keynote speakers from outside the bank.
2024: David Webster, Head of Google Lab. A fireside chat exploring how high-performing innovation teams navigate technical ambiguity, foster experimental studio cultures, and test early-stage hardware and software in public.
2025: Dominique Sillett Buxton, Executive Creative Director at Workato (and long-time creative leader at Salesforce). An inspiring keynote on creative leadership, building character-driven brand systems, and championing the craft of human storytelling in an era dominated by automation.
These sessions set an external benchmark for craft and provoked conversations that carried into the afternoon workshops.
Peer-to-Peer Breakouts: The Knowledge Inside the Building
The true engine of Design Day was peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Instead of relying on passive slide lectures, we curated breakout tracks taught by our own practitioners. To keep sessions grounded in practice, I set a strict rule: 15 minutes of context, followed by 45 minutes of hands-on making. Every session was designed to apply knowledge immediately, not just talk about it. As the industry evolved, the curriculum shifted dramatically between our two years:
2024 Breakouts — Cross-Disciplinary Craft & Empathy:
- Data-Driven Personalization for Corporate and Commercial Banking (Vantage)
- Non-Linear Approaches to Innovation & Rapid Prototyping (Incubator R&D)
- Designing for Utterances: Natural Language Processing in Fargo AI
- Content Priority Guides: Structuring Mobile Hierarchy Before Pixels
- Quantitative Modeling: Researching High Earners and Affluent Behavior
- Brains and Bodies: Physical Improvisation and Movement in Creative Work
- Innovation Showcase by Incubator R&D team
- Data-Driven Personalization for Corporate and Commercial Banking (Vantage)
- Non-Linear Approaches to Innovation & Rapid Prototyping (Incubator R&D)
- Designing for Utterances: Natural Language Processing in Fargo AI
- Content Priority Guides: Structuring Mobile Hierarchy Before Pixels
- Quantitative Modeling: Researching High Earners and Affluent Behavior
- Brains and Bodies: Physical Improvisation and Movement in Creative Work
- Innovation Showcase by Incubator R&D team
2025 Breakouts — AI as Intelligence Augmentation:
- Vibe Coding: Using Plain English, GenAI, and Figma Make to Build Functional Apps
- Synthetic Users: Testing Research Transcripts Inside Tachyon and Copilot
- Hyper-Personalization: Designing Around Money Behaviors and Cultural Values
- Career Crafting: Designing Skunkworks, Side Projects, and Creative Agency
- AI in Early Design: Supercharging Problem Framing and Perspective (Mollick Lens)
- Applying Design Thinking to Revenue Models and Business Model Canvases
- Innovation Showcase by Incubator R&D team
- Vibe Coding: Using Plain English, GenAI, and Figma Make to Build Functional Apps
- Synthetic Users: Testing Research Transcripts Inside Tachyon and Copilot
- Hyper-Personalization: Designing Around Money Behaviors and Cultural Values
- Career Crafting: Designing Skunkworks, Side Projects, and Creative Agency
- AI in Early Design: Supercharging Problem Framing and Perspective (Mollick Lens)
- Applying Design Thinking to Revenue Models and Business Model Canvases
- Innovation Showcase by Incubator R&D team
Lowering Social Friction: Speed Dating over Lunch
Bringing 120 designers into a space does not mean they will automatically mingle across rank and team boundaries. To dismantle hierarchy between junior designers and senior directors, we designed a structured Speed Dating session along the main gallery corridor.
Participants formed two facing lines down the 80-foot corridor. Every three minutes, one line shifted over. Instead of generic corporate small talk, pairs drew from prompt cards designed to trigger genuine laughter, debate, and personal stories:
Participants formed two facing lines down the 80-foot corridor. Every three minutes, one line shifted over. Instead of generic corporate small talk, pairs drew from prompt cards designed to trigger genuine laughter, debate, and personal stories:
"What is your controversial design opinion that would get you kicked out of a group chat?"
"Is Comic Sans ever acceptable, or is it the design world's equivalent of wearing socks with sandals?"
"If you could take one design tool from today back to your 10-year-old self, what would you bring?"
"If your work style had a theme song, what would it be and why?"
"Is Comic Sans ever acceptable, or is it the design world's equivalent of wearing socks with sandals?"
"If you could take one design tool from today back to your 10-year-old self, what would you bring?"
"If your work style had a theme song, what would it be and why?"
By the end of lunch, people who had only ever seen each other as initials on a Teams invite were laughing together, setting an open, relaxed tone for the afternoon sprint.
The Afternoon Sprints: Multiplayer Banking to Ambient AI
In the afternoon, we brought the entire summit together for a 90-minute design challenge. We formed cross-functional teams, deliberately mixing designers, researchers, and content strategists who had never collaborated before.
The briefs forced teams to confront structural shifts in customer expectations:
The briefs forced teams to confront structural shifts in customer expectations:
2024: Multiplayer Banking
Financial products are historically architected for single individuals or traditional joint accounts. Teams were tasked with designing services around dynamic group lives: roommates splitting unpredictable expenses, multi-generational families sharing elder care, or friends traveling together.
Eight teams synthesized behavioral research into rough prototypes and pitched three-minute concepts to the room, producing ideas like Travel Kitty (a shared vacation fund with group activity voting), Wrent Wranglerz (an apartment hub with automated rent verification and repair expense voting), and Super 8 (gamified teen financial literacy with progressive parental controls).
2025: Agentic AI and Ambient Computing
Building on our team's platform work, the 2025 challenge asked teams to imagine financial services that operate beyond the traditional screen. Teams prototyped concepts where autonomous agents and ambient interfaces handle friction in the background, exploring how proactive systems negotiate trade-offs, ask for human permission, and protect customer autonomy.
Lasting Cultural Impact
Design Day fundamentally shifted how creative teams operate inside the bank. The physical barrier to the Menlo Park campus dissolved; teams began using the maker labs, recording studios, and collaborative spaces regularly for their own workshops.
More importantly, it established a culture of mutual teaching. Breakouts like Vibe Coding and Synthetic User testing reduced friction around emerging technology, giving designers the agency to experiment with AI tools in their everyday work rather than waiting for formal mandates.
More importantly, it established a culture of mutual teaching. Breakouts like Vibe Coding and Synthetic User testing reduced friction around emerging technology, giving designers the agency to experiment with AI tools in their everyday work rather than waiting for formal mandates.
"Wanted to reach out and let you know your session was my favorite of the day! Definitely nice to know the science and research behind our intuitive habits. I've been craving the energy of yesterday's discussions and it was a great taste to get me re-inspired!" — Tiffany M., Senior Content Designer
For me, Design Day showed that enterprise design leadership is about more than shipping feature roadmaps or finding new strategic product opportunities. It is about building the infrastructure of trust, shared rituals, and continuous learning that allows creators to do their best work together.
A fun intro Design Day video created with AI (you can see how much the tools have evolved nowadays...).