Banafsheh Ghassemi, Founder and CEO
For over 25 years, Banafsheh has built, led, counseled, coached, and grown creative teams that drive product, customer, and service innovation at US-based and global for-profits, NGOs, and governmental entities. Banafsheh focuses teams to build their offerings, customer experiences, employee experiences, and internal capabilities with empathy for the beneficiaries such that they deliver sustainable value. She is an educator, a facilitator of creative collaboration, a big picture strategic thinker with a proven record of success in complex executions. She can translate complex human and organizational challenges into clear plans of action and human-centric solutions.
As an early adopter and practitioner, Banafsheh has been a leader in operationalizing the methods and mindsets of Human Centered Design globally in large and small enterprises, startups, and social impact organizations. She has advised the executive leaders of mobile, Internet, and green technology companies, global economic development institutions, financial inclusion organizations, health and nutrition sector, broadcast and digital media, business process outsourcing (BPO), and manufacturing sectors in systems thinking, design thinking, and human-centered mindsets as the foundations for organizations’ creative and collaborative culture.
Prior to Tangerine Lab, Banafsheh had served in a variety of executive leadership roles at Nextel, Sprint, Nasdaq, and the American Red Cross, where she was responsible for complex design initiatives focused on products and service innovation, customer experience strategies, and digital transformation.
Banafsheh currently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University School Of Continuing Studies, Integrated Design Management, and on the board of Center for Health and Democracy (CHD), a non profit built on the belief that the American healthcare system should not be designed and motivated by industry's profit motivations, but by the needs and rights of every American to have access to quality and low cost care.
For over 25 years, Banafsheh has built, led, counseled, coached, and grown creative teams that drive product, customer, and service innovation at US-based and global for-profits, NGOs, and governmental entities. Banafsheh focuses teams to build their offerings, customer experiences, employee experiences, and internal capabilities with empathy for the beneficiaries such that they deliver sustainable value. She is an educator, a facilitator of creative collaboration, a big picture strategic thinker with a proven record of success in complex executions. She can translate complex human and organizational challenges into clear plans of action and human-centric solutions.
As an early adopter and practitioner, Banafsheh has been a leader in operationalizing the methods and mindsets of Human Centered Design globally in large and small enterprises, startups, and social impact organizations. She has advised the executive leaders of mobile, Internet, and green technology companies, global economic development institutions, financial inclusion organizations, health and nutrition sector, broadcast and digital media, business process outsourcing (BPO), and manufacturing sectors in systems thinking, design thinking, and human-centered mindsets as the foundations for organizations’ creative and collaborative culture.
Prior to Tangerine Lab, Banafsheh had served in a variety of executive leadership roles at Nextel, Sprint, Nasdaq, and the American Red Cross, where she was responsible for complex design initiatives focused on products and service innovation, customer experience strategies, and digital transformation.
Banafsheh currently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University School Of Continuing Studies, Integrated Design Management, and on the board of Center for Health and Democracy (CHD), a non profit built on the belief that the American healthcare system should not be designed and motivated by industry's profit motivations, but by the needs and rights of every American to have access to quality and low cost care.