I challenged the belief that leadership is about having all the answers. My greatest impact was helping people believe in themselves and become more than they thought possible.
Jacqueline Hollenbeck · In Her Own Words
Her Story
About Jacqueline
Jacqueline Hollenbeck is an award-winning Design Systems and UX leader with more than 25 years of experience helping organizations scale through thoughtful design, collaboration, and customer-centered solutions. Throughout her career, she has created digital experiences, established scalable design practices, and brought together design, engineering, and product teams to solve complex challenges and deliver meaningful impact.
Most recently, Jacqueline served as Design Systems Manager at Ford Pro, where she led the strategy, governance, and enterprise rollout of an award-winning design system and coded component library supporting global commercial platforms. Her leadership enabled more than 120 product teams to adopt a unified design framework, improving consistency, efficiency, and delivery across complex digital experiences. Under her guidance, the Ford Pro Design System earned both a 2025 Bronze Stevie Award for Women in Business and a 2026 Gold American Business Award for its innovation and impact.
Prior to Ford Pro, Jacqueline built her career at TIAA and Fidelity Investments, where she contributed to enterprise design initiatives, established UX standards and accessibility practices, and developed reusable solutions that improved customer experiences and strengthened collaboration across organizations. These experiences shaped the leadership approach that defines her work today: creating clarity in complexity, building strong partnerships, and helping teams achieve more together.
Known for leading with empathy, integrity, and collaboration, Jacqueline has a unique ability to bring people together around a shared vision. She believes successful organizations are built when people feel valued, empowered, and connected to a common purpose. While she is proud of the systems and products she has helped create, she considers her greatest accomplishment to be the growth of the people she has mentored and supported throughout her career.
Jacqueline continues to explore emerging technologies, including AI-assisted workflows, to improve accessibility, documentation, and operational efficiency while keeping people at the center of innovation. Beyond her professional contributions, she is passionate about mentoring others and volunteering with organizations such as Best Buddies in Massachusetts.
Through her work in design systems, organizational transformation, and team development, Jacqueline continues to help organizations create scalable, accessible, and human-centered digital experiences while empowering the people behind them.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Jacqueline
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to curiosity, empathy, and investing in people.
Early in my career, I realized that leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about listening, asking thoughtful questions, and creating an environment where people feel supported, trusted, and empowered to contribute their best ideas.
I’ve also been fortunate to learn from incredible mentors who challenged me to think bigger, stay humble, and never stop learning. Those lessons shaped the leader I am today.
Throughout my career, I’ve found that when people feel valued and connected to a shared purpose, amazing things happen. Teams become more collaborative, innovation accelerates, and the results often exceed what any one person could accomplish alone.
The awards and successful products are wonderful milestones, but I measure success differently. I measure it by the people I’ve helped grow, the trust I’ve built, and whether I leave every team stronger than I found it.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I ever received was, ‘Your job as a leader isn’t to be the smartest person in the room. It’s to create a room where everyone else can do their best thinking.’ That advice changed my perspective on leadership. I realized leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about listening, asking thoughtful questions, removing obstacles, and creating an environment where people feel safe to contribute. Looking back, every meaningful accomplishment in my career, including leading an award-winning design system, was made possible because incredible people felt empowered to do their best work.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Don’t underestimate the value of your voice.
Early in your career, it can be easy to think you need to have all the answers before speaking up. The truth is that curiosity, thoughtful questions, and a willingness to learn often create more impact than having the perfect answer.
Seek out mentors who will challenge and encourage you, but also remember to become that mentor for someone else as your career grows.
Most importantly, don’t try to lead like someone else. Your empathy, perspective, resilience, and authenticity are strengths, not weaknesses. The leaders who make the greatest impact aren’t the loudest in the room—they’re the ones who help others succeed.
Build relationships, stay curious, embrace change, and never stop learning. Those qualities will carry you further than any title ever will.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we design and build digital experiences, and I believe that’s one of the greatest opportunities our industry has ever seen.
AI can automate repetitive work, accelerate research, improve accessibility, and help teams move faster than ever before. But technology alone isn’t enough. The real opportunity is using AI to free designers to focus on what humans do best: understanding people, solving meaningful problems, and creating experiences that build trust.
Another exciting opportunity is the growing recognition of design systems as strategic business assets. They aren’t just component libraries—they’re the foundation that helps organizations deliver consistent, scalable, and accessible experiences while enabling designers and engineers to collaborate more effectively.
The future belongs to organizations that combine emerging technology with human-centered leadership. That’s where the greatest innovation will happen.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The values that guide me are empathy, integrity, curiosity, and kindness.
Empathy helps me understand people beyond their job titles. Integrity means doing what’s right, even when it’s difficult. Curiosity keeps me learning, adapting, and growing, while kindness reminds me that every interaction is an opportunity to make someone else’s day a little better.
These values aren’t separate from leadership, they define it. I’ve always believed that people do their best work when they feel respected, heard, and supported.
Whether I’m leading a team, mentoring someone early in their career, or simply collaborating with colleagues, I want people to leave our interactions feeling more confident than when they arrived.
If I can help people believe a little more in themselves, then I’ve done something worthwhile.
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