Dean Donovan

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT DEAN DONOVAN

I\'m an experienced innovation and design lead with a strong track record across both private and public sectors. I help teams - from startups to large organisations - create new value for customers and drive better business outcomes through human-centred design. I take the guesswork out of innovation by uncovering real user needs, behaviours, and emerging trends. If you\'ve heard of \'Jobs to Be Done\' but haven’t used it effectively, I can guide you in applying it practically—across discovery, design, and the path to product-market fit. I really enjoy guiding cross-functional teams to flex their customer empathy muscles, step into the worlds of possible futures and get creative in designing solutions that stand out - like \'a flamingo in a flock of pigeons.’ My problem-solving approach strikes a balance between commercial outcomes, human connection, and creative thinking. Work engagements have taken me on an inspiring path through diverse sectors including Agribusiness, Healthtech, Professional Services, Infrastructure, Telecommunications, SaaS, Financial Services, Fashion and even junior athletics. I\'ve led research projects, design workshops, and service experiments to help teams overcome innovation barriers, improve product-market fit outcomes and fix under-performing services. Some epic moments in my career include- researched, designed and helped deliver a world-first innovation grant that’s provided $25.8m funding to 228 organisations in 2023/24 - Applied co-creation approaches with Maori entrepreneurs and industry providers to design and trial a Hāpaia mentoring service with 11 pakihi Maori (Maori enterprises) and 8 mentors - each founder achieved key goals over a 12 week period - introduced and supported product teams to apply experimentation frameworks in several large organisations - business mentored a team in the Fletcher Building 2017 “Leader’s Edge” cohort - Increased staff participation and idea quality in a new innovation portal for a top agritech company, using a human-centered design approach to improve their innovation management user experience- scoped how technology innovations could impact the customer experience, and deliver business outcomes, at BNZ’s international award-winning contact centre - led a six sigma project to significantly improve first call resolution rates in a 600+ seat contact centre. I\'m results-driven, highly dependable and can quickly adapt to work on diverse, complex problems. Let\'s connect if you\'re after a strategic design partner to. Please contact me directly on d••••••••@icloud.com.