Lada Gorlenko
Smartsheet
Director of UX Research • Seattle, WA
Lada Gorlenko is a Director of UX Research at Smartsheet. When Lada’s career started, ‘UX’ did not exist, the term and the discipline alike. A psychology graduate, Lada took a job at a female prison, investigating personality changes in long-term incarceration. Her ‘target users’ were murderers and drug dealers, and her ‘product’ was a rehabilitation course tailored to different personality types.
Later, Lada became a business researcher, investigating the effects of cross-cultural management training. In the last two decades, Lada has held ‘proper UX jobs’ at IBM, Microsoft, and Artefact. She is a co-founder of IxDA, a Program Curator of the Enterprise Experience, and a founder of Back to Work, a Seattle-based community of expatriate women looking to rebuild their careers in the US.