Why Katherine?

Katherine Zimmerman is a curious and driven systems-thinker that sees the general in the particular and the strange in the familiar. She believes in new challenges, new perspectives, and radical candor. An insomniac for a brain, an empath for a heart, and a weakness for hot tamales.

In her current role with American Specialty Health, Katherine recruits, mentors, nurtures and leads a highly engaged, passionate team of designers. She helps to level up, lead and scale design thinking across the product and design organization and provides product design leadership and creative direction. She collaborates closely with Executive Leadership, Engineering, Information Management and Clinical teams on design strategy, feature definition, and a user-centered, data-informed, outcomes-driven product roadmap.

Katherine provides informed product strategy direction and give useful feedback to project proposals and ongoing product work while inspiring and motivating the design team to provide innovative solutions, guiding them with a strong perspective of what constitutes high-quality experience design. She defines design quality and measures of success for the overall end-to-end member journey, builds scalable and repeatable processes, and functions as an executive change agent with the gravitas, emotional intelligence and track record that challenges the status quo by asking questions and driving continuous improvement. Katherine identifies and organizes opportunities to evangelize the UX & Design practice internally and externally to spread design thinking, thought leadership and enthusiasm throughout ASH and the wider design community.