Transdisciplinary design, product and people leader rewiring businesses and public institutions to work better for the people they serve.

“It's difficult to pin Mirko’s impact down to just a few projects, because he doesn’t just deliver outcomes. He shapes movements.”

Bill Higgins
VP, IBM Watson Platform Engineering

Principal, Program Director
IBM Product Management Program
2022-Present

Defining and authoring IBM’s POV on the anatomy of world-class product organization, encompassing product north star metrics, product quality standards, and high-performing product team practices.

Leading the development of curricula enabling all 800 product managers and 1000 cross-functional executives in IBM Software on world-class product management and design practices.

Principal, Program Director
Carbon Design System
2020-2022

Convened a coalition of subject matter experts to define IBM platform ecosystem-wide standards for user experience quality, product interoperability and common platform service adoption (“works together, works the same, works for me.”)

Evolved the Carbon Design System’s mission to support IBM’s emerging hybrid cloud platform-based growth strategy and deliver a coherent 1st- & 3rd-party provider experience, reducing time and resources required to deliver products that achieve platform ecosystem standards by an estimated 40%.
Led cross-functional product and system squads to across business units and local design systems to deliver an expansion of IBM’s Carbon Design System to serve ecosystem standards, assets, practices and domain insights. Formalized the System’s contribution and governance practices based on open- and inner-source patterns.

Senior Design Manager
IBM Design
2019-2020

Established a coalition of IBM clients including Ford, J&J, Lloyd’s, MSK, USAA, etc. to study opportunities to integrate of human-centered design into enterprise infrastructure. Authored IBM’s POV, featured in the Fortune Design newsletter to a readership of 120,000+.

Rearchitected and redeveloped IBM Consulting’s Design Adoption offerings from the ground up, leading to additional $14.5m in signings and $9m in revenue in the first year. Led delivery of pilots at a LATAM bank. Activated 800 IBM sales partners, and increased IBM’s Consulting’s capacity to deliver Design Adoption offerings by 3x.
Personally led design and research for state health, human services, education and commerce departments, enabling state officials to work across silos to develop unified COVID-19 response strategies. Led a cross-functional squad for the Rhode Island Department of Health to deliver resident-facing products and services estimated to reduce caseloads by 10,000/quarter based on late-2020 estimated reproduction value of r=1.3.

UX Design Practice Lead
IBM Design
2017-2019

Formalized UX design at IBM. Developed common language, principles and practices, enabling integration UX quality into IBM’s corporate performance management system. Led a cross-functional squad to envision, design, deliver and maintain journey management products, leading to a 50% average improvement in complexity scores among adopters in IBM & public sector clients.

Architected and operated the IBM Journey System, a management system for IBM Cloud to drastically simplify IBM’s value proposition to developers and improve key developer journeys. Led a research pilot on IBM’s cloud adoption journey resulting in a per-product average of 4x increase of digital leads, 2x increase in trial conversion, and $1-2.4M additional digital revenue within just 1 quarter.
Collaborated with IBM growth team to develop shared platform services that drove an average of 80% SaaS offering revenue growth, and 300% improvement in product consumption to adopting products in a 12-month period.

Enterprise Design Thinking Lead
IBM Design
2015-2017

Defined and authored IBM’s POV on the application of design thinking in continuous-delivery digital enterprises, creating the world’s first design thinking framework with 3rd-party analyst-verified impact: average of 75% decrease in design & planning times, 2x increase in delivery velocity, and 300% ROI.

Developed a curriculum and rubric for the certification of key roles in an innovation ecosystem. Formalized IBM’s adoption strategy into a program that activated and certified over 400,000 IBMers and clients in Enterprise Design Thinking.
Collaborated with CIO, finance organizations and software vendors to design business processes enabling IBM teams to procure world-class virtual collaboration tools used daily by every IBMer, including GitHub, Slack, Mural, etc.

Product Designer
IBM Cloud
2013–2015

Designed products for non-code users to build and deploy rapid applications using IBM's Cloud services. Novel schema design and UI templating tools reduced average customer time to value by 60%, and led to the product becoming the most used service on IBM Cloud within 3 months.

Organized a coalition of designers to identify gaps in opportunity validation across IBM portfolios, and supported a revision of IBM Design’s designer staffing policy based on portfolio management best practices.