Businesses ebb and flow, but they don’t always transform on their own. To shift with evolving technologies and ever-changing human needs, organizations often turn to consultants to help them stay ahead of the curve. That’s where Laura Roed comes in. As part of the business transformation team at Ernst & Young (EY), Roed spends her time developing strategies to help businesses innovate and achieve their goals. Whether she’s helping companies get a new product off the ground or charting out objectives for a 2030 plan, Roed is putting her design, tech, business, and communications skills to the test every day, bringing ideas to light from conception to ideation and beyond. 

Roed’s role is part design strategy-part-innovation-part-experience-design, a pastiche of hyphenates that speaks to the multifaceted nature of her responsibilities. Companies call on her department to make their dreams a reality, or better yet, discover what those dreams actually are when it comes to bettering their business.

“We essentially go through the design process and first discover what’s going on at the company and externally,” Roed explains. “We get a broad view of what’s going on and then we look at best practices in the market, especially if they’re launching a new product, and we help them define what that product or business model entails.” 

Through interviews, market research, and competitive analysis Roed is able to gain effective insight to design a creative course of action. Keeping technology, customer experience, and corporate imagination in mind, she’s essentially formulating an organization’s future.

“One of the projects I’m working on … they’re doing an entire enterprise architecture roadmap which just means we’re figuring out their technology rollout plan from today to 2030,” Roed describes. “But we have to figure out what 2030 looks like, where they’re at today, and how they actually get there.” 

Roed went down a Goldilocks and the Three Bears-esque professional path trying out various jobs from business marketing to ad agency art direction to a Cancer lab at USC. It was ultimately EY that gave her the chance to thrive in an intersectional position that felt just right. Flexing her design strategy muscles while working alongside technology teams and providing guidance from a business perspective checked off all the career boxes she was looking for. 

“I was like, what can I do to genuinely merge all of these fields?” Roed recalls. “Design is really valued at EY … It was the only thing I found so far that actually satisfies what I like to do.”

Roed adds that she felt a “head start” compared to her peers because of the Academy curriculum and framework. Collaborating with a team is crucial in her day-to-day life, and the school set her up for a deep understanding of how groups operate to maximize success. She also commends a unique preparedness for “working with ambiguity” due to the broad and complex prompts and processes she was adept at figuring out solutions for. 

“I think it made me a better problem solver and it made it easier to know what to do when nobody was giving me instructions,” Roed clarifies. “I’m generally always one or two steps ahead of my boss before they tell me what I need to do next. I have that longer term view that I think the Academy helped give me.” 

As an Academy student alongside Viterbi’s Laura Yen, Roed founded Frontida Records, a startup that builds custom electronic health record systems for humanitarian aid organizations. Roed is currently on the board of the directors as the company makes tremendous strides across the globe, recently partnering with groups in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Greece, and Romania. Roed is a devoted advisor to Frontida as she focuses full-time on transforming businesses at EY.

Naturally, Roed has hopes for the future that include a continued commitment to making the world a better place from the inside out. Roed strives to be in a position to make corporate advances that will ultimately positively impact the environment. 

She concludes of her ambitions: “I’m interested in seeing how a product across tech, business, design, marketing — all of the different areas that a larger enterprise has — plays out. That’s what I really want to focus on in the next two years. Getting good at that holistic process and being able to create real change at a large company, and learning how to do that. Once I’m able to do that, then I’m going to have a lot more power to create changes that would be beneficial in the world.”

As part of the business transformation team at Ernst & Young (EY), Laura Roed spends her time developing strategies to help businesses to innovate and achieve their goals. Whether she’s helping companies get a new product off the ground or charting out objectives for a 2030 plan, Roed is putting her design, tech, business, and communications skills to the test every day, bringing ideas to light from conception to ideation and beyond.

The “Roed” to Business Transformation