Agata Braja

Agata Braja was born in Poland and moved to Morocco when she was about four. Eight years later, she returned to Poland. She went to college in Poland, England, and Italy and then spent 10 years of her career as a data-driven design consultant based in Doha, Qatar, working with clients throughout the Middle East.

“I’ve lived in seven different countries, and I’m an only child,” Braja says. “I have a lot of experience of not belonging, being new somewhere, and struggling to fit in.”

As a result, she has a lot of empathy for newcomers and outsiders and a keen curiosity about different cultures. She’s mindful of those experiences when she designs user interfaces. “I know the difference inclusive solutions make, so I’m trying to make inclusivity a huge part of what I work on.”

What career goals brought you to Stanford GSB?

I love the intersection of design and technology and working across different cultures. But at some point, I felt there was not enough growth, and I wasn’t making enough of an impact. I wanted to focus on social impact, advance my technical skills, and leverage analytics science and AI in data-driven design. My partner suggested going back to school, and I thought he was crazy and it was too late for an MBA. However, I attended a webinar about the MSx program, and they described the ideal candidate. I thought, “This is great. This is me.” It’s a good opportunity to reflect on my career objectives and accelerate my career.

Have those goals evolved during your time here?

I had a high-level goal, but now I can narrow my selection, choose things that complement my skills, and fill in the gaps. I loved classes such as Problem Solving for Social Change and Data and Decisions. Every quarter, I’m building on what I’ve learned in the previous quarter.

Why do you feel it’s essential to measure and scale the impact of your design work?

For me, good design has to be a pleasant experience, and it has to solve a problem. Now, how do we decide if it has solved a problem or not? We need to have the right metrics to figure that out.

Isn’t design primarily about aesthetics?

That’s a misconception. Tracking the results is an integral part of the process of deciding what to design and how to design it. You design, measure, iterate, and refine solutions based on how they work and as the user’s needs evolve. I just love numbers, too. I was always a quant person. I went into engineering because I liked things that were objective. It either works or it doesn’t. At the same time, my family has very long artistic traditions, going back five or six generations, and I have always loved the creative side. It was a struggle to find a sweet spot that uses data to influence design, but it’s possible to measure and quantify design, and those are aspects of design I enjoy.

Tell us more about your family’s creative side.

My great-grandfather was a painter. He died in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, and I found an old clipping from a paper in Poland with a few paragraphs about him. That inspired me to start painting during COVID, and now acrylics are a huge part of my life. My mom and grandfather used to paint as well. I have many uncles who are sculptors and professional artists. The whole family has quite an artistic inclination. I’m trying to combine creativity with metrics.

Was there a single moment when you realized that creating positive user experiences was something you were passionate about?

One of the most satisfying moments was ten years ago when I went to Oman to lead the design of the national telecom mobile app. I had to dive into the user experience, research, and talk to Omani families and entrepreneurs. It was a lot of research and design work because many cultural insights had to be translated into the user interface. That was when I finally leveraged all those little experiences that seemed disconnected. I realized I was finally combining all those key skills and things that make me happy, efficient, and valuable.

One of the projects you worked on involved building the intranet for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022. What was the most challenging cultural nuance you faced on that project?

You have people from many cultures and countries with many different first languages, so how do you design an intranet that respects the local culture and is efficient and transparent about time constraints? So, the first thing you would see when you logged into the intranet was a countdown to the World Cup, which was the same in every language and culture.

Do you have any heroes in the user-experience field whose work you admire?

I love IDEO, a design studio founded in the 1970s by David Kelley, Dennis Boyle, and others. And one of the great things about being at the GSB is that they’re both lecturers at Stanford. So, I contacted Dennis Boyle, and we had a wonderful conversation. It’s just mind-blowing. You have people who are your idols, and you can meet them. They’re helpful and interested in what you do.

Is there any single product that you consider the quintessential design breakthrough?

Yes. The first [commercially viable] mouse was created for Steve Jobs at Apple, because of the way it was prototyped. That’s the essence of design thinking to me. They quickly assembled a rough prototype to test a concept instead of spending months in a 3D design studio and working on a refined product. They used low-fidelity to test some initial ideas and look at the results. That was in the 1980s, but the approach is timeless.

You founded a digital strategy consultancy. What are the most valuable lessons you learned about being an entrepreneur?

I love building new things, and I thrive with people who are passionate about their work. That’s why I love startups — they’re dreamers and doers, and it’s a very different approach than in large corporations where you don’t have that same energy and excitement. The second thing I discovered is that creativity is a skill that can be learned. I love empowering people with creative and problem-solving techniques and seeing how much people can learn if they follow the process.

Photos by Elena Zhukova