Elliott Williams

I am a Pittsburgh based designer and currently Design Practice Lead (Head of Design) at numo, a PNC bank company. I manage all designers in the organization and provide the strategic direction of design as a discipline within the company. In addition, I operate as a Venture Designer and use a design based approach to developing new businesses that will eventually incorporate and become their own subsidiaries of the bank. In my free time I teach at CMU in the Human Computer Interaction Master's program.

I've founded companies like LegalSifter that has raised over 6MM to date from institutional investors and grew the company from myself to 15 employees and 20kMRR. I started the first coworking space in Pittsburgh, and grew that to a 5,000sqf space with nearly 100 members and despite all the titles I could have taken and often use, such as founder, CEO, GM, I still call myself a designer because I attribute the success of all of my projects to the level of empathy and advocacy I learned when becoming a designer, and more importantly the methodologies I take in all my business ventures.

Seamus

Seamus is a mixed breed 35 pound rescue. He has 3 years life experience, and for that whole time has followed me around making a sometimes excellent travel companion, personal assistant, and alarm system. In his spare time he enjoys long walks to the dog park, chasing down groundhogs, and barking up trees.

My Values

Silo Free

Working on one project or within one business unit is not usually the best way to advance long-term, large-scale change. I’ve tried. More often than not, organizational boundaries and siloed thinking creates stagnation and gridlock. I seek integrative thinking across companies and action that brings together multitudes of stakeholders.

Human Centeredness

Creating the future and moving people to innovate isn’t done solely through numbers and analytics. I believe in the human process of discourse, debate, and alignment. I use frameworks that are a systematic way to frame human ecologies and wicked problems that don’t make it into a spreadsheet, and then acting on them critically and collectively.

Making the Complex Clear

Problems of business, technology, and the human experience are complex. Simplification has its risks: you can lose resolution, the social dimension, or the interconnections. I rely heavily on frameworks to clarify the complexity without simplifying it.

Iterative Solutions

Blue sky. Focus groups. Market reports. Cool. Unfortunately, these approaches provide generalized guidance, short term solutions, or direction that leads into corners. They show us what doesn’t work. I like to test ideas through experimentation, nudging systems from all sides. This helps my team learn fast, align to a clear direction, and get to more sound solutions faster.

Risk Taking

Innovation is full of incomplete information and insufficient data, but decisions still need to be made. I believe in taking risks because what choice is there? I work with companies to understand how to fill information gaps with strategic-first principles, company and audience values, and how to follow hunches with confidence.

Balance

I seek middle-way outcomes that balance the needs of business strategy and stakeholder needs; efficiency and experience; the bureaucrat and the risk-taker. Too much emphasis in either direction leads to being stuck with “the way things have always been done” or risk too great to assume. Truly innovative solutions harmonize the two sides.