Smitha Papolu currently helps small businesses focus on achieving their bold dreams – she is reimagining how accounting could be for people who have chosen to pursue their passion.

Her design and research counterparts find that she challenges them to master new skills and bring their best to every situation. Her engineering and product partners look to her for a deeper understanding of the users they serve and pushing what’s possible today. She finds that this passion for solving problems can be contagious, which when utilized by multidisciplinary teams, can help generate ideas and solutions that change the world for the better. In the past she has led design and research in world-wide enterprise teams, building cloud, desktop, mobile, and IoT products and services; most recently at Intuit and previously at Citrix Systems.

Every month, as program co-chair of San Francisco Bay Area’s ACM (BayCHI) chapter, she brings a potpourri of HCI-related topics and discussions on the place of UX in the world to the local audience.