Scott Berkun is a bestselling author and popular speaker on UX design, innovation, leading teams, public speaking and other subjects. He’s published eight books, including  How Design Makes The World, The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker, and The Year Without Pants. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, Wired magazine, USA Today, Fast Company, National Public Radio, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and other media. His popular blog is at scottberkun.com and he tweets at @berkun.

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His first career (1994-2003, 2010-2012) focused on program management and leading teams. He worked primarily on UX Design related projects, where he worked initially as a user researcher, UI prototyper, but primarily a cross-discipline team leader. He worked at Microsoft on Internet Explorer 1.0 to 5.0, Windows, MSN, and as the design and usability advocate for Microsoft, training people and running events across the company. In 2003 he left to start a career as an author and speaker. Later he led an engineering team at WordPress.com (2010-2012) responsible for Jetpack, Publicize and other features used by millions of people (the story of this team is told in his book, The Year Without Pants).  

He was born and raised in Queens, NYC, studied philosophy, computer science and design at CMU, taught creativity at the University of Washington, was a co-host of CNBC’s The Business of Innovation TV show, is named on 5 U.S. patents, blogged for Harvard Business and BusinessWeek, and has appeared as an expert on various subjects on CNN, CNBC, NPR and MSNBC. He’s also the MC and speaker coach for Ignite Seattle, was awarded an Amtrak 2014 writer’s residency and directed the short film We Make Seattle.

Image credits: World Domination Summit (orange), Mind The Product and Melinda Hurst Frye / Ignite Seattle.