VP of Global Design
Pamela Mead has spent the last 15 years building design teams and practices in successful companies as diverse as Delivery Hero, HERE Technologies, Telefónica, and Yahoo!. Her
expertise has always excelled when focusing on working with emerging technologies to create meaningful products and services that have a positive impact on people’s lives.
Pamela started working in the Bay Area during the dot-com boom, and gravitated towards the mobile and advanced technology space. At Yahoo!, she led the mobile-focused team, centred on Connected Life, an early concept of a connecting experience of mobile, TV and computers into a single communication space. She moved to Madrid in 2011 to set up a customer-driven innovation practice at Telefónica, succeeding in engaging both businesses and key stakeholders in the design process and customer-focused practices.
In autumn 2019, Pamela joined SumUp to head up the entire Design organization – encompassing Product, Brand and User Research – with global responsibility. Since joining, she has been spearheading the effort to turn SumUp’s services into a cohesive, powerful and personal SuperApp experience that serves merchants’ breadth of needs when running their business. Her team is establishing the narrative for SumUp’s UX strategy - from brand expression to experience and service principles. She has been establishing user research as a foundational practice for all product, marketing and design work with a strong focus on empathy building aligned with SumUp’s mission.
With a Master’s Degree in Design and Communication from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Pamela brings a research based, systems approach to solving business problems leveraging design tools. She is a passionate leader who empowers teams to find ways to solve the right problems in ways that delight through their simplicity, effectiveness and integrity.
She believes it is essential that product teams participate deeply in building new practices that incorporate design ethics, as well as social and cultural implications in anticipating the future(s) we are creating: her goal is to challenge non-inclusive design thinking, embracing accessibility as a core value for how to build products, and trying to bring knowledge about the diversity of the customers to creating truly inclusive solutions and services through design-thinking, user research and building empathy.