Selected Experience

SHAUN GUMMERE CONSULTING Boston, MA

Founder, Lead Strategy and Service Design Consultant 2025–present

  • Partner with leaders to turn ambiguous customer and employee challenges into research-backed experience strategies, end-to-end journey design, digital experiences, technology integrations, and workflows that increase external engagement and internal productivity.

  • Led field research and a human-centered assessment of AI- and agent-based products and workflows for Takeda Pharmaceuticals to ensure employee use and engagement translated into a positive, measurable customer experience.

MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN Boston, MA

Adjunct Faculty, Design Innovation Grad Program 2025–present

  • Teach Innovation Lab (MDes 603), a hands-on graduate-level course covering human-centered research, ideation, concept testing, prototyping, iteration, and business model innovation.

PORTFOLIO T Silicon Valley

Global CX and Design Lead 2023–2024

  • Led a global team of 12 researchers and designers in a Silicon Valley venture studio, de-risking early-stage innovation and supporting founders from opportunity validation through product-market fit.

  • Defined research and design methodology, metrics, and team capabilities that improved speed to insights and enhanced the quality of deliverables.

  • Mentored and coached the team across ideation, customer research, concept testing, and product prototyping, building conviction to scale or pivot.

  • Partnered with executive leadership to explore AI as a strategic capability to differentiate our venture building model.

CANTINA Boston, MA

Chief Experience Officer 2021–2023

SVP, Design Strategy and Research 2019–2021

VP, Experience Strategy and Service Design 2016–2019

  • Established a new practice area in service design and experience strategy, which contributed to 200% account growth year-over-year. Hired, led, and managed the team.

  • As Chief Experience Officer, co-developed Cantina's strategic plan with the executive team, defining clear objectives and measures, and led the firm's repositioning to engage a new kind of buyer through brand definition and direction of firm-wide Marketing. Initiated the internal Cantina Conference to drive employee engagement in change. Established and hosted the Cantina Conversations series to raise brand awareness. Guests included Indi Young and Ben Little.

  • Led complex mixed-methods engagements including the redesign of LabCorp's end-to-end patient experience (13-stage journey, 56 pain points, 20 unmet needs; preferred over existing and competitor experiences by nearly 90% of users tested) and a service-design engagement for the educational startup Shorelight Education that shaped both student-facing experience strategy and internal organizational structure to unblock their path to a $1B valuation.

  • Led a member and consumer experience innovation engagement for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts that increased visitors by 5x and drove over 1,000 co-creative conversations with consumers; applied the widest array of methods of any engagement in my Cantina portfolio: ethnographic and intercept interviews, service safaris, contextual observation, participatory co-design, role-playing, future-state journeys, service blueprints, ecosystem maps, and full-scale physical prototyping. Basis of my Service Design Week conference keynote, “Design-Led Change: Service Design, Innovation, and Storytelling” (Chicago, 2019).

STORY+STRUCTURE Boston, MA

Chief Design Officer 2013–2016

  • Oversaw design activities in two areas: as part of strategic engagements, encompassing discovery, co-design, and delivery of findings to client leadership; and creative execution of digital, organizational, and service deliverables that arose from our collaboration with clients.

  • Shifted the practices of the firm from web design to human-centered design, which altered the breadth and scope of client engagements, and supported a sales and marketing strategy that tripled the pipeline. This resulted in increased scope of engagements from $50-70k in 2013 to $100-400k in 2015. Total firm revenue increased 300% from 2013-2015.

  • Acted as team strategist and lead designer on the California State University East Bay project, which included not only web design, but also branding, positioning, and recruiting design. The client realized a 700% increase in leads from the new website and improved conversion through a new shopping cart for prospective students. UPCEA recognized the site with a “Silver” award. The firm leveraged this successful project to increase awareness of offerings, drive revenue growth, and enlarge average size of engagements. The client renewed each year with the total contract value approaching 7 figures.

  • Led strategic engagements with Berklee College of Music, Early Head Start, Georgetown University (SCS), and Insightfil, a health-care start-up. Berklee saw a 12% increase in enrollment from a new undergraduate admissions web experience we created and expanded our engagement to encompass additional admissions websites. Early Head Start’s custom web application improved engagement and provided data on content use; they renewed and expanded the engagement over two years. Georgetown SCS launched a new student-centered brand and messaging architecture that underpinned a website redesign focused on streamlining enrollment and CRM integration, yielding a 10% increase in enrollment; Insightfil shifted their go-to-market strategy and leveraged our engagement for successful grant funding.

  • Defined student experience strategy and enrollment methodologies to guide the implementation of Salesforce for various higher ed clients, avoiding the “technology or technology’s sake” trap.

SIMMONS UNIVERSITY Boston, MA

Senior Director, Design and Online Marketing 2001–2013

Instructor in Design, Department of Communications 1998–2010

  • Built an integrated digital marketing communications and design team that oversaw nine major web properties, social media, content marketing, email marketing, online advertising (SEO/SEM), and CMS administration in support of brand awareness, enrollment marketing, student services, and advancement communications. Established the Accessibility Team and was early in adopting web standards across the university.

  • These efforts contributed to 12% enrollment growth and improved selectivity (an average decline in the acceptance rate) between 2001–2009. The marketing website was awarded a Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Gold Award.

  • Created a multi-channel alumnae/i and public awareness digital strategy to engage with over 50,000 alumnae/i and support two capital campaigns ($50 million and $85 million), both of which met their goal. Led the digital strategy and implementation of the annual Simmons Leadership Conference, which generates over $1 million for graduate scholarships each year.

  • Initiated a multi-channel content marketing strategy, including the launch of the College’s official blog, a comprehensive social media presence, and the in-house production of numerous videos, including the Campaign video “Making Education Work.” Increased prospect engagement by 40% in two years.

  • Created a business-process-driven Web Services Master Plan, which resulted in a successful $90,000 grant award from the Davis Educational Foundation to fund a new Student Web Portal that serves Simmons’ 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

  • Assessed and implemented the university’s first enterprise CMS (RedDot), which increased project delivery velocity by 3x. Supported the implementation of the university’s first CRM (Hobsons).

  • Established a governance structure to align resources, goals, and timelines across the university, working closely with the President’s Council and other constituencies to balance competing interests. Managed external vendors, including defining statements of work.

  • Served as a CASE judge several years in a row for integrated marketing campaigns and publications.

  • As an instructor in the Department of Communications, taught courses on interactive design, motion graphics, and advanced design; guest lectured in numerous courses; and served as an independent study advisor. My courses were consistently fully attended, with strong “word of mouth” referrals. Served as an independent study advisor.

Education

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

Master of Arts in History

MIAMI UNIVERSITY

Bachelor of Philosophy cum laude in Interdisciplinary Studies

Skills

LEADERSHIP

  • Leadership & People Management: Proven ability to manage, mentor and coach teams to inspire high performance. Strong interpersonal skills to influence key stakeholders and gain buy-in.

  • Strategic Thinker: Adept at analyzing complex business and customer experience challenges and developing innovative yet pragmatic solutions. This includes skills like insights research, critical thinking, design thinking, and strategic analysis.

  • Relationship Building: Skilled at developing trusted advisor relationships with executives and effectively navigating organizational politics. Works across silos to build relationships of trust.

  • Climbing the Ladder of Abstraction: Keeps an eye on the strategic outcome while diving deep into the details. A friend referred to this as the ability to climb up and down the ladder of abstraction. I often call it ‘eyes on the prize.’

COMMUNICATIONS

  • Storytelling: Strong ability to make complex ideas clear and persuade through engaging storytelling and visual communication.

  • Public Speaking & Presentation: Excellent presentation and facilitation skills. Comfortable in small groups and large gatherings.

  • Writing: Clear and compelling writer for the web, marketing communications, and complex longer-form articles.

DESIGN

  • Insights Research: Wide and deep expertise in primary and secondary qualitative research and analysis, including qualitative interviews, co-design, observation, and related methodologies. Effectively combines qualitative and quantitative research to derive data-driven insights.

  • Design & Design Thinking: Deep expertise in design thinking principles, service design, UX design and human-centered design. Leverages skills to uncover user needs, ideate innovative solutions, and iterate and test prototypes from low- to high-fidelity. Comfortable with ambiguity and the process to move from insights to compelling, market-ready solution.

  • Visual and UX Design: Decades of hands-on design experience creating engaging websites and mobile apps. Applies user insights and evaluative research methods throughout the product development lifecycle.

  • Product and Service Design: Wide experience delivering the holistic, end-to-end design of product and service experiences. Expertise in customer journeymapping, service blueprinting, and the application of actionable metrics to deliver engaging and delightful customer experiences.

  • Branding and Marketing: Understands the power of brand and how to articulate and give it structure. Experience with marketing communications, SEO/SEM, and content marketing.

  • Creative Direction: Effective application of guidance so the design team retains a creative spark and can produce compelling work.

PRODUCT & CX

  • Strategy & Vision: Ability to formulate and communicate a compelling strategy and vision to guide product and CX.

  • Collaboration & Partnership: Highly collaborative and adept at building relationships among stakeholders, customers, and internal teams.

  • Product Development: Deep understanding of product lifecycle management from ideation, design, development, launch, and iteration.

  • Customer-Centric: Obsessed with deeply understanding customer needs and adept at a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to make data-informed choices. Designs omnichannel experiences that are seamless across customer touchpoints. Adept at personalizing the customer experience.

  • Front-stage/Back-stage Orchestration: Expert in the design and measurement of front-stage customer journeys as well as the alignment, incentives, and efficiencies to ensure back-stage employee workflows meet customer needs and expectations.

  • Innovation Mindset: Encourages exploration, ideation, and creative problem solving. Open to new approaches and technology to propel the product and customer experience forward.

SOFTWARE

  • The basics: Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Microsoft Office, Google Suite, and related tools and software.

  • Experience with enterprise content management systems (CMS), customer relationship management systems (CRM, e.g., Salesforce), and marketing automation systems.

  • Actively exploring agentic AI systems (e.g., Claude Cowork)