Insights on Product Development

Building World-Class Product Teams that Deliver Innovation and Impact in the Age of AI

“The magic doesn’t happen from the smartest person in the room. It happens when cross-functional teams make great music together.” The Myth of the Solo Hero Jeff Chow (Chief Product & Technology Officer at Miro) walks onto the stage and immediately does what great product leaders do: he lowers the temperature. He isn’t interested in yet another debate about whether AI is amazing or terrifying. He’s interested in the thing that decides whether any technology wave actually creates value: the wa

Navigating Enterprise Transformation: Design and Data for Competitive Advantage

“Data is the lifeblood of a company. It’s more important today than it ever was because of AI.” Ed Lovely Reinvention as an Operating Habit IBM has been around for more than a century, and Seth framed that longevity around a single consistent thread: reinvention. The point was not nostalgia. It was proof that the company has repeatedly rebuilt what it offers and how it brings those offerings to market. Seth pointed to IBM’s recent shift as evidence. Seven years ago, less than half of IBM’s re

From Cost Center to Strategic Asset: Redefining the Role of Design

“Having a seat at the table means the ability to influence with valued impact so that when we set the train on the tracks, we know we’re going in the right direction.” - Paul Strike If you have ever been asked to “just mock it up” five minutes before a sprint planning session, you already know the problem this fireside set out to name. Design is still widely treated as an execution function, a finishing layer, a service desk for screens, buttons, and polish. Paul Strike and Falguni Desai did no

AI in Learning & UX Design: Augmenting, Not Replacing

“You won’t lose your job to AI, but to someone who uses AI better than you do.” Mike Brown (Head of Design at Barclays) credited that idea to UX pioneer Jakob Nielsen, and it framed everything that followed. The future is not a single switch from humans to machines. It is a reshaping of capability, and the people who learn fastest will set the pace. A design leader in a learning world Mike has spent years leading design organisations in large companies, where scale is both a gift and a const

Leveraging AI for Safer and More Efficient Healthcare Delivery

"We can use technology to empower our providers. But if people do not adopt it and use it, we are never going to achieve what we are looking for." Building AI where the stakes are life and death When Ashley Beecy (MD, FACC, Medical Director, AI Operations, New York Presbyterian Hospital) stepped onto the stage, she did not open with futuristic sci-fi or glossy product demos. Instead, she started with an uncomfortable truth. In healthcare, there is an explosion of machine learning research and

From Lip-Service AI to AI-Empowered Experiences: A Customer-Centric UX Framework

“You do not need to know everything in order to speak and innovate in AI. You just need to know enough.” When Muriel walked on stage at UXDX USA 2025, she did not start with model architectures or buzzwords. She started with anxiety. The kind many designers and product people quietly carry when AI enters the conversation. The belief that unless you understand every acronym and every algorithm, you have no right to lead. Then she dropped the line that set the tone for the rest of her talk. You

From Design Systems to Interaction Systems: Creating Coherent AI Experiences

How Connor Joyce Sees AI Transforming Product Coherence In a year defined by rapid AI adoption, Connor (Senior User Researcher at Microsoft) delivered a talk at UXDX EMEA 2025 that cut through the hype with a clear call for discipline. Rather than pushing teams to ship more AI features, he urged them to pause and reconsider how AI should behave, how it should be integrated, and how teams can build products that feel unified instead of fragmented. His central argument was that design systems mus

How to use AI to become a 10x Product Team

Product teams are standing at the edge of a seismic shift. The ones who thrive will be those who build at the frontier of AI capability, compress product cycles from months to minutes, and think beyond their remit acting as AI general managers across the business, not just their product lines. When Anthony Maggio, VP and Head of Product Management at Airtable, took the stage in Berlin, he didn’t talk about AI as hype or threat. He talked about practice. Drawing on hundreds of conversations with

Human-Centered AI Across Standard Chartered

In an era obsessed with automation, Emily Yang (Head of Human-Centered AI and Innovation - Strategy and Talent at Standard Chartered) argues that AI’s real potential lies not in replacing people but in empowering them. Speaking at EMEA 2025, she showed how a 172-year-old bank can innovate responsibly without losing empathy, trust, or human identity. Her message was clear: technology is only 30% of the solution; the other 70% is people. From Biochemistry to Human-Centred AI Emily’s path to AI

Building AI-Driven Workflows at Airtable: Play, Prove, Productionise

 “Everything we’ve known is changing right now. Do not rely on what you know. Step back and figure out the next set of best practices.”  Jimmy Hillis, VP and Head of Engineering, Airtable Three Waves, One Inflection Jimmy doesn’t open with hype. He opens with perspective. For him, AI isn’t an add-on or an accessory; it’s a fundamental shift in how products are conceived, built, and refined. At Airtable, where the mission is to empower non-technical teams to build tools that fit their unique w

Designing for Business Impact: A Transformation Journey at Uber

A design team is hidden in a corner of the company. Cross-functional partners are unsure who to talk to. Confidence is low, and influence is slipping. When Joann Wu stepped into Uber as Vice President and Global Head of Design, she found immense talent without a seat at the table. Three years later, that same team is defining strategy, driving business metrics, and reshaping product experiences for millions. This is the story of how Joann led one of the most significant design transformations in

Everyone's Onboard. So Why Isn't Change Happening?

The room says yes, the slide says value, the pilot says proof. Then Monday arrives, and nothing moves. In Everyone’s Onboard. So, Why Isn’t Change Happening? Rory Madden slices through the polite theatre of transformation to reveal the two levers that actually shift behaviour inside organisations: KPIs and ease. If the bonus says “on time and on budget” and the path to change is hard, motivation will lose every single time. From Silos to Systems Rory opens with a simple truth that many of

Reframing UX in Complex Organisations: Marijke Jorritsma

When products slow, meetings multiply, and decisions dissolve into “task forces to decide how to decide,” the problem isn’t your interface. It’s your organisation.

From IT-Driven to Product-Led: How Steven Roest Is Rewiring ING’s Operating System

A teenage death-metal fan who swore he’d never work at a bank walks on stage and opens with a promise: “This talk is guaranteed AI-free.” Steven smiles, then gets serious. The real superpower in complex organizations isn’t another framework or a shinier dashboard. It’s empathy. And once you start treating platforms, tooling, and alignment as products built for real users, you can move an institution the size of ING. Without breaking it. The Opening Riff Steven’s origin story is disarming and

Evolution of Grammarly's Platform: From Developer Operations to Developer Experience

From Operations to Experience: How Grammarly Rebuilt Its Engineering Culture  What makes 500 engineers move in sync without slowing each other down? At Grammarly, the answer wasn’t a new framework or another automation layer; it was a change in philosophy. “We stopped thinking about DevOps as maintenance,” said Serhii Vasylenko, Senior Software Engineer at Grammarly. “We started thinking about it as experience design.” The Moment of Realisation In 2020, Grammarly faced a familiar growing