Kara's background is a mix of private and public sector experience, including Director of UX for Vice President Biden at the White House. She currently champions businesses of one, freelancers, and independent contractors on the QuickBooks Self-Employed team. Prior, Kara received an appointment to the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, where she served as entrepreneur in residence, reimagining the relationship between government and the people from a technology perspective. She was senior advisor at 18F, TEDxIntuit founder, TurboTax UXer, and worked on the Oscars and Super Bowl.

Kara does pro-bono digital strategy for the likes of Team Rubicon; spent 10 days in rural India teaching micro-entrepreneur women human centered design; and guest lectures at UC San Diego STEM Academy for high school girls. She graduated summa cum laude from Penn State with a masters in instructional design, and was San Diego Woman of the Year finalist.

Health and wellness of an organization's or project's performance can be relatively simple. In a snapshot we can know a lot: dashboards and metrics tell us about how well our work is progressing, what milestones we're reaching, and what color-coded alert state of panic we should be in. And we can optimize our way into just about any green-colored diagram we choose.

Teams, and the humans that comprise them, are fascinatingly complex and complicated. We can fool ourselves into believing all kinds of things about them. And yet, we can't really know for sure unless we dive in deeper and learn about their health, their needs, and try to help them optimize for their individual successes. In this presentation, Kara shares her approach to the care and feeding of humans, with lessons gleaned from working at the highest echelons of sports, entertainment, government, and technology.