Munawar Ahmed

Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder

Short Bio

Munawar Ahmed is a systems designer who leads systems architecture, product strategy, and operations. She founded a systems design firm in 2006, running it for twelve years before serving as Managing Director at Accenture and then as Global Head of Design and Partner at Oliver Wyman. Munawar graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Cognitive Science and Human Behavior, from USC with an M.S.Ed in Curriculum and Instructional Design, and from Columbia University in Systems Analysis and Software Engineering.

Long Bio

Munawar Ahmed designs award-winning products and builds rockstar teams. And she knows how to scale. On any given project, Munawar is deeply involved from inception to release, and has been described as the "unrelenting force that holds the entire project and its people together”.

Over the last two decades, Munawar has worked in banking, insurance, fintech, healthcare, education, telco, media, publishing, railroad, retail, and government. She is best suited for a startup environment or megacorp where transformation is no longer a musing but a mandate. Munawar is at her best when engaged on large-scale service design projects, experience overhauls, and bringing health and happiness to design and engineering teams. She runs a tight ship and has zero tolerance for bad behavior, convoluted architecture, short-sighted logical models, sloppy writing, or dead weight.

In her most recent leadership roles at management consulting firms Accenture and Oliver Wyman, she brought a human-centric, design-led approach to large enterprise-level programs for a wide range of clients. This approach led to significant savings and unprecedented growth, solving deep-seated systemic problems both internally for employees and externally for customers. Munawar effectively steps in as interim Chief Product Officer or Chief Design Officer, depending on the structure of the client organization, introducing teams to modern, streamlined, integrated ways of building and launching products and services far more quickly than the typical time-to-market cycles.

Munawar is most well-known for her work at Verizon in 2016. Verizon’s board and executive leadership team put forward the challenge of removing $300 million in annual call center operational costs by way of a superior self-service experience. After 11 months of zero progress and setbacks, Munawar was asked to come in and turn around the project. Her 2019 stage talk on her approach and methodology has been adopted by hundreds of design and engineering teams, globally. By introducing new ways of working, Munawar was able to achieve 4x throughput with the same number of people. "Never before in the history of Verizon has a program of this scale, of this complexity, of this many disciplines, launched something in seven months. Never.”

Munawar is masterful at master planning. She can consume and process incredibly large volumes of information and disparate data sets, turning chaos into order with incomparable speed and agility. She is almost savant-like in this regard. The more complex and messy, the happier she is. With almost machine-like speed and precision, she can transform total chaos into serene order, bringing clarity and focus to large programs in a matter of weeks, not months. Munawar is relentless in her pursuit of simplicity and clarity, all for the greater good.

Munawar started her career as a technical writer for AS400 mainframe systems, writing 600-page user manuals with exacting detail at Donovan Data Systems. After completing her studies at Columbia University in systems analysis and software engineering, the scope of her work eventually expanded to included systems architecture, database design, interface design, and product design.

Munawar’s method of documenting and conveying important information is as clear and concise as it gets. Munawar is known for her natural ability to whiteboard complex processes in real time and guide a room full of cross-disciplinary heavy hitters to agreement. Speaking, writing, drawing — all come with ease and stem from a deep desire to make things easier for others.

Beyond the simplicity and beauty of the actual product itself, there is an unequivocal simplicity and beauty in the documentation Munawar trains her teams to create. Requirements, data models, roadmaps, experience maps, journeys, user interface designs, copywriting, detailed specifications, logic diagrams, test plans — the experience of creating the experience is just as important as the thing that gets launched.

Munawar graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Cognitive Science and Human Behavior, from USC with an M.S.Ed in Curriculum and Instructional Design, and from Columbia University in Systems Analysis and Software Engineering, with a special focus on logical database design and interface design. For four years, Munawar taught in the MFA program for Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City. She is also a guest lecturer at various design schools, teaching seasoned teams how to operate with both efficiency and humanity. Yes, you can have both.

Munawar lives in New York with her husband Matthew Schnepf, an accomplished architect, and her two sons Owen and Alastair. She loves hosting parties, cooking up a Pakistani feast, and playing board games next to a roaring fire. She has traveled extensively and enjoys being swept up in the language, culture, and cuisine of a place. The most exciting collaborations — both personal and professional — are found in the most unexpected of places.

Superpowers

The Fixer

On more than one occasion, Munawar has been referred to as The Fixer. When things have gone sideways and a situation feels hopeless, Munawar gets the call: “We’ve got a situation here. I hear you’re like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, Can you fix this?”

Systems Savant

Munawar is a systems thinker, through and through. She is both systematic and deeply intuitive, in equal measure. Like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Munawar has an almost savant-like ability to make sense of just about anything that’s thrown at her, no matter how chaotic and disjointed it may be. She can connect the dots, bring clarity in a brilliantly concise way, and create a clear and simple path forward. Her ability to find the signal through the noise is unparalleled.

Deep Empath

Munawar is a deep empath. Striking a balance between quiet observation, active listening, and playful brainstorming sessions, Munawar is able to bring out the best in people and bring out the stories that matter — the stories from which the most salient requirements are derived and ultimately shape a product or service that is loved and used by millions. The best ideas come from the most unexpected places. Munawar has the ability to connect with people in a deeply authentic way and get to the essence of what needs to be solved for.

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