- 2 November, 2024
- By Atena
I turn customer insight into better product decisions and drive meaningful business change through customer-centric thinking.
With a background in service design and technology, I help organizations become genuinely customer-centric, not just in what they say, but in how they think, plan, prioritize and make decisions.
My work focuses on aligning strategy, roadmaps, and ways of working around real customer needs, especially in complex, product- and sales-driven environments where customer signals often get lost. I’m interested in how organizations translate customer understanding into strategic and operational choices, and why this often proves difficult in practice. In many contexts, customer insights exist, but fail to meaningfully influence direction, priorities, or ways of working.
I partner with cross-functional teams to structure ambiguity, align perspectives, and design decision-making practices that connect insight to action, bringing clarity to messy systems and ensuring customer understanding meaningfully shapes direction.
Years of Experience
Projects Completed
• Turn qualitative and quantitative research into clear priorities
• Define problems, opportunities, and product bets
• Connect customer signals directly to roadmap and backlog decisions
• Lead roadmap and backlog prioritization
• Design decision frameworks (e.g., desirability / feasibility / viability)
• Guide teams toward high-impact investments
• Manage end-to-end customer, partner, and employee experiences
• Identify systemic gaps across touchpoints and teams
• Embed customer perspective into governance and planning
• Align product, engineering, and business stakeholders
• Structure ambiguity and drive evidence-based decisions
• Enable collaboration across competing goals and constraints
“Atena has acted as the key bridge between service design and product management. She proposed, defined, and rolled out opportunity value index across all our software development practices as a way to bridge understanding gaps between product, design, and technology, as well as to provide a structured framework for all stakeholders to evaluate and understand new roadmap ideas.”
Fennel Aurora“Throughout our collaboration, Atena has consistently demonstrated a rare combination of strategic thinking and practical execution. Together, we have tackled complex challenges ranging from design discussions and implementation planning to the development of AI-integrated tools. Her ability to navigate these diverse areas while maintaining a clear focus on user needs and organizational goals has been impressive.”
Enrique Parre“As she moved into Service Design, Atena's impact became even more strategic. She is a designer who doesn't work with assumptions; instead, she seeks clarity by looking at the broader service ecosystem. A great example of her logical approach was her work on opportunity value index derivation. This framework simplified our decision-making process and provide a clear, data-driven path for our product initiatives.”
Dayananda Aswathaiah