Team Spotlight: Katy Kanne
- Posted by Katy Kanne
- On February 7, 2022
At Engenious our team is key to our success, and we love to celebrate all the individuals who make it happen. We are highlighting the people who make Engenious Design a leading design firm for medical devices and high technology systems.
Katy Kanne
Katy has been one of our Project Managers/Product Managers at Engenious Design since April 2016 working in the medical/high tech device design area. She has a keen eye for detail and will constantly push to make sure everything is completed on time, as promised. When asked what keeps her going when projects seem to hit roadblocks, she replied with, “You’ve got to keep moving or you’re going to get stuck.” She doesn’t see roadblocks, she only sees new challenges and looks for ways to get around them, over them, or through them.
Of all the projects she has worked on over the years, her proudest project was a device that treated cancerous tumors via targeted drug delivery. It just so happened to be at the same time she was reading “Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, about Steve Jobs who famously died of pancreatic cancer. But also, because the roots of the therapy were founded by Jane Cook Wright, an oncologist from the early 1900’s who is featured in a “Women in Science” book that Katy reads to her daughter almost every night. It seemed like the perfect project for Katy to work on. However, there was another project that some other team members at Engenious were asked to work on and it’s the one that Katy would have loved to be a part of.
When you walk into the office at Engenious Design, there stands a scale model of a rocket under development that’s heading to space, Engenious is part of designing that rocket. When asked what project at Engenious that you didn’t work on, but wished you had, Katy quickly responded with, “Duh. Rockets.” We are all proud of our work on that rocket!
Katy is often juggling more than one project at a time and hopes to someday work on her dream project. She doesn’t know when or how, but anything related to music recording or vinyl records, she would jump on that project in a heartbeat. She is often listening to anything from The Grateful Dead to Taylor Swift in her office, which makes her a self-proclaimed “dead-head-swiftie,” and it keeps her going throughout the day, even more than coffee.
Katy has been involved with so many amazing, technologically challenging projects over the years. She said she feels like she works with a bunch of “Q’s” here in the office making spy gadgets. It could explain why she is the 7th employee here at Engenious Design, but she likes to refer to herself as employee number 007. She has always been able to look at any project from the end-user perspective and explain that to the rest of her team, making her a huge value to everyone here at Engenious Design.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Katy Kanne
Katy is a marketer-turned-product manager dedicated to defining the direction of products and championing the client’s reasons for making it. She has a passion for user needs gathering, value-driven product strategy, and usability design. Katy also gets a thrill from risk analysis and management! She has been in medical device development for half a decade, which partners well with her previous, almost decade of experience in marketing consumer package goods. Katy’s ability to provide an empathetic, end-user perspective to project designers and engineers makes her a huge value to the team.
