Member since January 2026
Sanchita Bajaj is a Design Director at Verizon, where she leads experience design and strategic innovation across consumer authentication, privacy, account management, billing, and payments. With over 15 years of experience, she focuses on building human-centered platforms that enable trust, personalization, and meaningful customer relationships at scale.
Raised in a conservative household in India, Sanchita was expected to follow a predefined path—academics, career, and life decisions largely shaped by others. Her eventual journey into design, grounded in empathy and systems thinking, reshaped how she leads and advocates. Midway through her career, she became more conscious of how gender norms had influenced her choices, fueling her commitment to women’s empowerment and inclusive leadership.
As a speaker, Sanchita explores the intersection of design leadership, identity and autonomy, inclusive decision-making, and building human-centered systems within large enterprises. She brings a candid, practical perspective that blends lived experience with actionable insights.
A couple of topics:
Personal + Empowerment
I light up when talking about identity, autonomy, and the quiet ways women learn to minimize themselves—often without realizing it. I’m passionate about helping women unlearn inherited expectations, name their own ambition, and make intentional choices in their careers and lives.
Design + Humanity
What puts a smile on my face is talking about empathy—not as a buzzword, but as a leadership skill. I love exploring how human-centered design can restore trust, dignity, and agency in complex systems, especially inside large organizations.
Leadership + Growth
I’m most energized by conversations about conscious leadership: how we make decisions, who gets heard, and how leaders create space for others to grow. I’m especially passionate about mentoring women navigating influence, reinvention, and power in traditionally male-dominated environments.
Blended
I’m happiest talking about identity, empathy, and choice—how women come to recognize their own voice and agency over time. I’m deeply passionate about human-centered leadership, designing for trust, and helping people move from inherited expectations to intentional, values-led decisions.
I often share the story of how starting my career in math and science shaped me into a stronger design leader. Trained to value precision and “right answers,” I initially struggled in a field that rewards ambiguity and empathy. Over time, I learned how analytical thinking and emotional intelligence can coexist—and how that combination helps teams design systems that are both scalable and deeply human. It’s a story about reframing background, not abandoning it.
How to lead high-performing teams without relying on hierarchy. By intentionally blending individual contributors and people managers—and being clear about trust, ownership, and accountability—I’ve seen teams move faster, collaborate better, and grow stronger together. The lesson: leadership is less about control and more about creating clarity and safety.
I share a story about a moment when another woman leader named something I hadn’t yet admitted to myself—that I had been navigating my career largely alone. Experiencing true sisterhood at work changed how I show up as a leader: I now actively create space for women to support, advocate for, and lift one another. It’s a story about unlearning scarcity and choosing collective growth.
I didn’t take a straight path to leadership or design. I grew up in a conservative family in India, where success was defined early and decisions—what to study, what career to pursue, even personal choices—were often made for you. I followed the expected route into math and science, believing achievement meant compliance.
Design entered my life almost by accident, but it changed everything. It taught me to value empathy alongside logic and to see ambiguity not as failure, but as possibility. As my career progressed, I learned to navigate large, complex organizations while advocating for human-centered thinking, trust, and inclusion.
It wasn’t until mid-career that I fully recognized how deeply gender norms had shaped my confidence and choices. That realization reshaped how I lead. Today, as a Design Director, I focus on building systems—and cultures—that give people agency, voice, and room to grow.
I often share the story of how starting my career in math and science shaped me into a stronger design leader. Trained to value precision and “right answers,” I initially struggled in a field that rewards ambiguity and empathy. Over time, I learned how analytical thinking and emotional intelligence can coexist—and how that combination helps teams design systems that are both scalable and deeply human. It’s a story about reframing background, not abandoning it.
How to lead high-performing teams without relying on hierarchy. By intentionally blending individual contributors and people managers—and being clear about trust, ownership, and accountability—I’ve seen teams move faster, collaborate better, and grow stronger together. The lesson: leadership is less about control and more about creating clarity and safety.
I share a story about a moment when another woman leader named something I hadn’t yet admitted to myself—that I had been navigating my career largely alone. Experiencing true sisterhood at work changed how I show up as a leader: I now actively create space for women to support, advocate for, and lift one another. It’s a story about unlearning scarcity and choosing collective growth.
I didn’t take a straight path to leadership or design. I grew up in a conservative family in India, where success was defined early and decisions—what to study, what career to pursue, even personal choices—were often made for you. I followed the expected route into math and science, believing achievement meant compliance.
Design entered my life almost by accident, but it changed everything. It taught me to value empathy alongside logic and to see ambiguity not as failure, but as possibility. As my career progressed, I learned to navigate large, complex organizations while advocating for human-centered thinking, trust, and inclusion.
It wasn’t until mid-career that I fully recognized how deeply gender norms had shaped my confidence and choices. That realization reshaped how I lead. Today, as a Design Director, I focus on building systems—and cultures—that give people agency, voice, and room to grow.