Kara’s an engaging, high-energy speaker whose talks span leadership, career development, design, and product.

Kara has spoken in the US and internationally at SXSW, TEDx, Leading the Product, and UX leadership conferences about leading highly complex initiatives, human-centered design, business operations, culture building, and management. She’s also given talks at company internal leadership conferences and state of the company events.

In addition to being a dynamic speaker with experience across a wide range of audiences, topics, and formats, Kara’s also a sought-after emcee, fireside chat interviewer, and panel moderator.

If you’ve got an upcoming event, conference, corporate offsite, annual meeting, industry conference, leadership meeting, or speaker series at your company, college, or team meeting, let's chat.

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  • The Cancer Moonshot story: Lessons in human centered design

    The Cancer Moonshot story: Lessons in human centered design

    In this behind the scenes talk, you'll hear lessons learned on applying human centered design at scale and how to use technology to help achieve the seemingly impossible in the Obama White House: making a decade’s worth of advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, in five years.

  • The Leader's Guide to the Care & Feeding of Humans

    The Leader's Guide to the Care & Feeding of Humans

    Teams, and the humans that comprise them, are fascinatingly complex and complicated. To deliver the best results, and cultivate org cultures that retain great talent, we need to dive in deeper and learn about team health and their individual needs. 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.

  • The Art of Reinvention

    The Art of Reinvention

    In this talk, learn three key lessons gleaned from over a decade moving seamlessly between the highest levels of entertainment, tech, government, and sports. Kara shares her experiences at the White House, Oscars, Super Bowl, and Silicon Valley, and how you can apply those strategies to your career.

  • Rainy with a Chance of Baby

    Rainy with a Chance of Baby

    It's a surprisingly little known fact: 15% of couples are infertile, and 25-40% of detected pregnancies are miscarried. But no one talks about these things. Until now. In this groundbreaking for its time 2013 TEDx talk, three-time cancer survivor Kara Fitzpatrick shares her story of love, loss, and the struggles that go along with trying to conceive a child. And how a positive attitude (and sometimes wildly inappropriate humor) got her through it all.

Other talks & workshops

  • Trust & transformation: Your guide to modern mentorship

  • Build your culture playbook: Shaping organizational culture to drive change

  • Extending your leadership: Unleashing your team’s potential

Select appearances and press

Keynote

  • Leading the Product | Melbourne, Australia

  • Engineer + Product Manager Conference (company event) | Stockholm, Sweden

  • Southeastern Journalism Conference | The University of Tennessee at Martin

  • Code Writers Conference: Software Leadership in a New Era | Washington, DC

Emcee & panel moderator

  • The Lightning Machine | Moderator for panel featuring Peter Diamandis, Orlando Jones, Denise Young Smith, and Bobak Ferdowsi | Los Angeles

  • TEDxMidAtlantic | Emcee | Washington, DC

  • Lean Startup Conference | Panel moderator | Las Vegas, NV

  • The List: TED-style Public Speaking 101 | Moderator | online

Speaker

  • Creative Mornings | San Diego, CA

  • TEDxCoMo | Columbia, MO

  • Leading Design Conference | London, England

  • Designing Public Services for the Digital Age | Sydney, Australia

  • Canadian Digital Service: Inclusion, Belonging, and Diversity | Virtual

  • UXPA International Conference | Workshop facilitator and Ignite talk | London, England

  • Design Forward | San Diego, CA

  • Toastmasters Leadership Institute | San Diego, CA

Podcast guest

Guest lecturer

  • Harvard University: Using human centered design in government | Cambridge, MA

  • Berkeley Executive Leadership Program | Haas Business School at University of California, Berkeley

  • UCSD Summer STEM Academy for High School Girls | La Jolla, CA

  • George Washington University School of Media & Public Affairs | Washington, DC

Kara donates 5% of her speaker fees to charity.