Employee Spotlight: Annasara Geva
May 5, 2023
Welcome to our series of Employee Spotlight articles where we highlight the contributions and career backgrounds of Anuvu employees around the world. These are the people who help dream and deliver innovation that moves our customers forward.
If you’re ordering a beverage on Anuvu’s Airtime Market portal or browsing the entertainment microsites for Cathay Pacific or United Airlines, chances are high that Annasara Geva played an integral role in the look and functionality of those digital products. Annasara is Anuvu’s Creative Director, overseeing from Montreal a small team that works on the design of Anuvu creations, their form and use, considering such critical factors as a product’s appearance and how customers will interact with it.
Does the product, app or microsite feel inviting? Does it represent a customer’s brands and values—and Anuvu—well? “My team works closely with the product team. We oversee the UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) and user testing,” they said of the team’s work. “All the things related to designing a product.”
Prior to their design work at Anuvu, Annasara, who is gender nonconforming, lived across Europe before emigrating to Canada in 2011, where they became a Canadian citizen in 2019.
“As an immigrant you kind of start your life every time you move countries,” said Annasara, who is known by the nickname Nana. “When I came to Canada, I was happy to have a trade—there is solace in the idea that I am doing something that is a respected trade, and I am relatively good at it,” they said. “I’m not the best and I’m not the worst. It is something that I go back to on the regular and be like, ‘How am I doing at this?’”
Nana began Canadian life working at a creative agency at a junior level. But they quickly moved higher because of prior experience in the field. Agency life, where one’s work week can top 100 hours, was incompatible with family life. “It was interesting, it was challenging, and I learned a lot, I met a lot of very cool people,” Nana said. “But it’s also quite an unsustainable pace if you have a family.”
In 2018, Anuvu recruited Nana to build a creative team. The initial efforts were on connectivity products, working with a London-based team. They later consolidated that team, and some employees in India, into a creative team in Montreal. Today, the six-person design team works closely with the product team.
“From helping validate concepts with user testing to working through edge cases unique to our industry, their team helps us create experiences that wow our clients and excite our end users,” said Jess Boyadjian, a product development director, who works closely with Nana. The teams’ creative process has become “a fun and enriching exchange of ideas,” Jess said.
As they consider Anuvu’s brand values during a Teams call, the notion of Anuvu as a collection of disparate cultures, skills and functions comes to Nana’s mind. That makes agility keenly important to align the company around reaching business goals.
“You need to understand that this is a company that grew by acquisition,” Nana said, likening Anuvu to “a lot of different islands that have come together under one umbrella. You have an enormous amount of variety and diversity in terms of the nature of the work that people do, their culture and their geographical culture.”