What the Industry Doesn’t See: Executive Decisions Through the Eyes of Women Who Were Never the Default:
Most leadership strategies are designed for a “default executive” that never existed. In this talk, Anastasia Leutloff and Natalia Ogorelysheva, co-founders of Deep Tech Collective e.V., reveal how executive decisions look different when made by women who were never the default. Both
share their experiences navigating leadership, development, and innovation as foreign mothers in Germany and female leaders in tech. Anastasia applies her skills as a Project, Program & Portfolio Lead at TRUMPF, where she drives industrial technology, workplace transformation, and fostering women in tech, while Natalia combines her experience in leading development projects in logistics at Fraunhofer Enterprise Lab and advancing research in robotics at TU Dortmund.
They show how lived asymmetry becomes a strategic advantage, exposing blind spots in digital transformation, talent strategy, and market decisions — and why organizations that ignore these signals lose resilience, innovation, and trust.