Jessica Speigel

Jessica Speigel is VP of Product Design at Upstart, where she leads experience design for a platform that has originated more than $61 billion in loans for over 4 million borrowers, built on AI underwriting that looks beyond traditional models to understand a person's full financial profile.

Jessica got her start designing everyone's favorite encyclopedia. In the two decades since Encarta, she has led design for global consumer products at Microsoft, Amazon, HBO Max, and Fanatics. As Director of Product Design at HBO Max, Jessica led Platform Experience for a service with more than 75 million subscribers and $7.7 billion in annual revenue, and founded its Data-Driven Experiences team. She built the personalization practice from scratch, bringing user-centered design to probabilistic experiences before it was cool. She then brought that leadership to Fanatics Betting & Gaming as VP of Experience Design, where she built a full-stack experience design team from the ground up and led experience design across the portfolio. The mobile app reached the top three in its category during her tenure.

Jessica's test for a design is whether it's unexpectedly useful: a new lens on a complex problem, or a moment of joy in a task that used to feel painful. She measures her own leadership the same way, by whether the designers on her teams leave better than they arrived. She was born and raised in Seattle, where she lives with her husband, two kids, and one geriatric cat. She enjoys art and architecture, like most designers, and makes as many things by hand as she can, preferably with no plan at all. Blankets, mostly. Sometimes weird dolls.