Introduction
Jennifer Warawa is the Chief Commercial Officer of DIRTT Environmental Solutions, a prefab construction company that combines sustainability, digital design, flexibility and speed to market for the built environment. In this episode of The Power of Design Podcast, she talks with host Jack Ossa about being a high-performance professional and about new ways to deliver interior design and construction projects.
It is the last of four episodes in which Jack talks only with women leaders. He says diversity and inclusion matter to him as a first-generation immigrant.
About the Episode
Jennifer names two traits of high performers: learning agility and the ability to take feedback. She describes agility as knowing what to do when you do not know what to do, and says it can be learned. Jack shares how podcasting helped him become quicker at conversations despite being an introvert. On feedback, they discuss hearing everything, taking the useful half and not treating criticism as a personal attack.
Jennifer grew up in Kelowna, British Columbia, in an entrepreneurial family. She studied accounting, started an accounting and consulting business and says what she loved was telling a story with numbers. She later sold the business and worked for a global software company for 12 years before moving to Atlanta and, in 2019, joining DIRTT, where she leads sales, marketing, partner experience and client experience.
They discuss DIRTT's modular approach, its design software and virtual reality tours, and why speed, cost certainty and schedule certainty matter to clients. Jennifer explains that flexible walls let organizations build for what they need today and change later, including embedded technology for hybrid work, and that clients are weighed down by the need to predict the future. The conversation ends with mentoring, young people's fluency with technology and how a space can tell the story of an organization.
Key Takeaways
- Learning agility: high performers know what to do when there is no clear path.
- Take feedback well: listen to all of it, keep what helps and avoid defensiveness.
- Relationships drive every business: trust is built over time by doing what you say you will do.
- Speed and certainty: after COVID, clients want faster delivery and fewer unknowns in cost and schedule.
- Build for today, adapt for tomorrow: reconfigurable interiors reduce the pressure to predict the future.
- Experience the space: virtual reality shows problems that a floor plan hides and speeds up decisions.
- Use mentors both ways: find someone who tells you the truth, and learn from younger colleagues too.
Highlights from the Conversation
I believe that every business is a relationship business.
Jennifer Warawa
You shouldn't need to predict the future to be able to build your space.
Jennifer Warawa
When you walk into a building, what story is the space telling you?
Jennifer Warawa
Topics Discussed
- Learning agility and receiving feedback
- From accounting entrepreneur to software executive
- Prefab and modular interior construction
- Speed to market and cost certainty
- Flexible, reconfigurable space
- Technology built into walls for hybrid work
- Virtual reality for design decisions
- Mentoring and reverse mentoring
Why This Conversation Matters
Clients rarely know what they will need in five years, and Jennifer's point that you should not have to predict the future shapes how we approach interior architecture: planning for change from the start. Our adaptive reuse work such as Hedgemore Flex and our workplace project BWM Office reflect the same priority on flexible, well-designed interiors. Her closing idea that a space tells a story about an organization's values also connects to branding.
About the Guest
Jennifer Warawa is the Chief Commercial Officer at DIRTT Environmental Solutions, where she leads sales, marketing, partner experience and client experience. She grew up in Kelowna, British Columbia, built an accounting and consulting business, and spent 12 years at a global software company before joining DIRTT in 2019. Connect with Jennifer Warawa on LinkedIn.
