Jana Werner

Jana works with executive teams worldwide to help them architect customer-centric organizations designed to move at the speed of their best ideas. She shares success patterns leveraging her experience as both a hands-on practitioner and as the leader of the AWS Enterprise Transformation Practice for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She guides customers on holistic transformation journeys spanning technology adoption, data and AI literacy, innovation, ways of working, culture, and leadership development.

Jana built her expertise through a career at the intersection of strategy and technology: scaling a tech start-up to its acquisition by Hewlett Packard, leading digital and transformations in UK financial services, including at Tesco Bank, and advising DHL on global change management.

Before her current role on the AWS Executives in Residence Team, Jana spent four years leading AWS' Enterprise Transformation Practice for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In this role she worked with the executive teams and transformation leaders of AWS’ largest customers, to help them accelerate time to value. These experiences reinforced her core insight: sustainable transformation happens with people, not to them. Her mission is to unlock the dormant problem-solving energy in organizations to help them thrive in an era of constant change.

Her approach uniquely bridges academic rigour with hands-on experience.  Jana holds a doctorate on uncertainty dynamics in projects, with research contributions to the Fraunhofer Institute and the Centre for Mathematics and Informatics in Amsterdam. 

Jana shares insights from guiding multinational corporations as a guest lecturer at universities including Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Hong Kong University. She mentors start-ups and women in technology, and her forthcoming book, "The Octopus Organization" (Harvard Business Review, December 2025), explores building highly adaptive organizations.

At AWS, Jana helps organizations surface and challenge the limiting beliefs that create self-imposed barriers. Rather than implementing top-down programs, she focuses on tapping into the experience and motivation of those closest to customers, while shifting leaders to become architects working on the system rather than in it. Her expertise spans change management, technology adoption, culture and leadership development, governance acceleration, organization design, customer-centric innovation and product management.