Vinisha
Halli
Service Design Practice Lead, EY GDS
Ted-like
Customer Experience
Mid-level Designers
About The Speaker
Vinisha Halli is an award-winning Service Sesigner with 15+ years of experience in designing services and products and creating experiences for users. She currently leads the Service Design Practice at a Big4. An architect and visual designer by education, she has built her proficiency in service design as she learnt it along the way with stints in Tata Elxsi and Designit. In her current role at a Big 4, she advises businesses on developing and practicing people-centric business designs to enable seamless interventions in an ever-changing world. She also works with multiple sectors and multidisciplinary teams to bring a human centric approach to services and products. She has designed for digital transformations, enterprise employee experiences, mass rapid transport systems, narrative spaces, innovation hubs, in physical environments and digital spaces, that span various industries and domains.
She loves to sing and is learning the piano, is a foodie, vocal proponent of concepts like layers and contrasts, a recent tattoo aficionado and planning her next tattoo.
What drives Vinisha is always creating the best value for all the people involved. She believes that perspective matters, possibilities are endless and that good design is honest.
About The Talk/Workshop
Is the Dog wagging its tail?
The talk, “Is the dog wagging the tail, or is the tail wagging the dog?”, is a presentation by a seasoned Service Design Practice leader from a “Big 4” consulting firm, drawing on her 15 years of experience in the industry.
The talk uses the metaphor of a dog and its tail to illustrate the critical difference between proactive, strategically-led business operations and reactive, consequence-driven approaches. Many businesses struggle to deliver excellent experiences due to three common challenges: disconnected internal systems, an inability to anticipate evolving market risks, and difficulties in aligning and empowering the right people within the organization.
The central message is that a design-led approach is the key to overcoming these hurdles. By putting people at the center of business design and aligning systems effectively, organizations can shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive strategy, ultimately leading to seamless interventions and superior stakeholder experiences in an ever-changing business landscape.
Key Takeaways
Strategy Before Reaction
Why leading with a proactive, design-led strategy results in more seamless and effective experiences than reacting to problems after they arise.
The Three Core Hurdles
Explore the biggest barriers businesses face—disconnected systems, misaligned teams, and blind spots in anticipating change—and how they impact experience delivery.
Design as the Business Engine
How a people-centric, design-led approach can align systems and empower organizations to drive meaningful, resilient change.