Short biography
Patrick Sharbaugh is a design strategist, facilitator, and educator with 15 years of experience working with globally recognized enterprises, international universities, startups, and incubators. He’s created and led large communities around innovation and design in Melbourne, Australia, and Portland, Oregon. As a VP of Community and Customer Engagement at Aquent, he led a national (US) community of 100+ senior in-house designers from some of the most recognized brands in the world. He’s been a coach and mentor for the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ LISA/LEAD program, and an advisor to American startup Masa Fresh, which was joined Techstars’ Social Impact Accelerator program in 2023 (Atlanta). In his work with LUMA Institute, he’s helped enterprises from Accenture and Microsoft to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Nike and Starbucks create more innovative, design-led cultures, and he leads the Lisbon Chapter of Voltage Control’s international Facilitation Lab.
Main skills
Innovation and startup culture, outcome-based facilitation, strategic design, problem framing, team building and alignment, change management, bottom-up design, coaching and instruction, community building, value proposition refinement, product-market fit, business model generation, ideation and brainstorming, rapid iteration, user testing, ethnographic field research.
Areas of interest for mentoring
User Research. Problem definition and problem framing. Team building and alignment. Facilitation. Value proposition refinement. Product-market fit. Business model generation. Ideation and brainstorming. Rapid iteration. User testing.
Motivation to be a mentor
Nothing makes me happier than working with people as a coach, mentor and instructor to help them understand the power of a user-led approach to product and service development.
Availability for mentoring sessions
- Face to face;
- Online meeting.