Manjari Sahu
Senior Designer at Rabobank
Manjari Sahu is an Indian-born designer with over a decade of experience spanning India, the USA, and Europe. She holds a master’s degree in Design for Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, where she served as a research assistant, contributing to cutting-edge interaction design and technology-led user research methodologies. Beginning her career in industrial and retail design in India, Manjari expanded her expertise in user experience and service design, and moved to Europe, working for amongst others Vanberlo, Accenture, and Philips.
Currently working at the Dutch cooperative Rabobank, Manjari leads service design for the Business Lending domain, embedding customer-centric thinking across journeys, systems, and cross-functional teams. She plays a key role in shaping design maturity at scale, connecting strategic vision with operational execution, and enabling design-driven business transformation. Her multidisciplinary design background—spanning industrial, interaction, and service design—makes her uniquely equipped to tackle complex transformation challenges. She bridges visual, spatial, and digital domains, ensuring cohesive experiences across touchpoints and channels.
Manjari Sahu
Senior Designer at Rabobank
Manjari Sahu is an Indian-born designer with over a decade of experience spanning India, the USA, and Europe. She holds a master’s degree in Design for Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, where she served as a research assistant, contributing to cutting-edge interaction design and technology-led user research methodologies. Beginning her career in industrial and retail design in India, Manjari expanded her expertise in user experience and service design, and moved to Europe, working for amongst others Vanberlo, Accenture, and Philips.
Currently working at the Dutch cooperative Rabobank, Manjari leads service design for the Business Lending domain, embedding customer-centric thinking across journeys, systems, and cross-functional teams. She plays a key role in shaping design maturity at scale, connecting strategic vision with operational execution, and enabling design-driven business transformation. Her multidisciplinary design background—spanning industrial, interaction, and service design—makes her uniquely equipped to tackle complex transformation challenges. She bridges visual, spatial, and digital domains, ensuring cohesive experiences across touchpoints and channels.
Sessions
Designing expertise at scale: building strategic influence at Rabobank
How do you scale design in a legacy-heavy, highly regulated environment, and move from delivering solutions to shaping strategy? At Rabobank, we’ve grown a design team of over 100 professionals and built design maturity not as a destination, but as a continuous journey. This case study talk shares how we’re embedding service design across the organisation, not just as a practice but as a mindset; transforming how teams collaborate, how policies are shaped, and how human complexity is addressed through systems thinking. From employee experience to backend tooling, we show how a journey-first approach is helping us reimagine the inner workings of the bank.
We’ll also share how we work with product teams to shift from product thinking to lifecycle thinking; supporting farmers, entrepreneurs, and consumers through services that meet real human needs. Through real-world case studies, you’ll hear what it takes to drive customer-centricity in large-scale financial services, influence across silos, and make design matter in places where regulation, risk, and legacy systems are the norm. This session is for designers, strategists, and design leaders working in complex or regulated settings—anyone curious about building strategic design capability that scales, sticks, and transforms.
Design leadership
Journeys & ecosystems