Sara Beckman

Sara Beckman is Faculty Director of the Product Management, Product Management Studio, and Customer Obsessed Design programs at Berkeley Executive Education. Sara is an award-winning Haas faculty member who creates and delivers courses on design, innovation, and product management. She has published case studies on design for sustainability, design road mapping, and leveraging design approaches in sales processes.  In over thirty years at the Haas School she initiated new courses on design, entrepreneurship in biotechnology, new product development, and problem framing/solving, won four awards from MBA students for excellence in teaching, and received the Berkeley campus Distinguished Teaching Award.

Professor Beckman’s current research focuses on the pedagogy of teaching design and on the role of diversity on design and innovation teams for which she developed a Teaming with Diversity curriculum (teamingxdesign.com) that is being used in classes in engineering, biological sciences, humanities, and business at UC Berkeley and elsewhere. 

Professor Beckman directs Product Management Programs for the UC Berkeley Executive Education, serving over 300 product managers from around the world each year.  She has trained over 5,000 Product Management executives through this program and through a custom Product Management program she designed and leads at Google. She also serves as Faculty Director for the Leading Innovative Change executive program and a new offering on Customer Obsessed Design. 

Professor Beckman has always served as a boundary spanner between the business and engineering schools. She developed, institutionalized and directed the school’s Management of Technology Program and served as the Chief Learning Officer of the Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation within Berkeley's College of Engineering. In this role, she facilitated the creation of a multi-disciplinary Certificate in Design Innovation for business and engineering students. She now serves on the Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation's Faculty Council and co-teaches a class on Collaborative Innovation with colleagues from the Theater/Dance Performance Studies and Art Practice departments.   

Before joining Berkeley-Haas, Professor Beckman worked in the Operations Management Services group at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and ran the Change Management Team at Hewlett-Packard. Dr. Beckman received her BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management.

Sara also co-creates impactful custom programs for our corporate, government, and university partners.