Insights on Product Development

Who Moved My Roadmap? Navigating the Unpredictable Future of UX and Product in the Era of AI

Donal O’Mahony has heard the phrase “once in a lifetime shift” so many times that it has lost its meaning. The dot com crash. Flash is dying overnight. A multi-billion-dollar acquisition that rewired a company’s culture. Now, generative AI is arriving with enough speed and noise to make even seasoned leaders feel like their roadmap has been stolen in broad daylight. Donal steps on stage as Vice President of Experience at Contentful, ending the conference with a deliberately optimistic note. Con

Building Customer Intuition Across the Product Lifecycle

“Customer intuition is the ability to understand and anticipate customer needs, pain points, and behaviours throughout the product lifecycle.” When a new Chief Product Officer arrived at Docusign, the research team got a request that sounded both important and slightly impossible: build stronger customer intuition across the organisation. Marine Palamutyan and Morgan Davis were honest about the first reaction. They did not know what “customer intuition” meant in this context. How do you build

From Research to Reinvention: Prayag Narula on Startups, Setbacks & AI Innovation

The uncomfortable pivots, the moments you get “dumped” by your own company, and the stubborn grit it takes to get to the end of a day when nothing is working. Prayag’s story begins where many product stories end: in research, not as a supporting function but as an identity. He came to the US to study research at Berkeley, taught design research there, and expected to take the academic path all the way to a PhD and professorship. He even joked that part of his dad still expects him to finish. Bu

The Superpowers and Shadows of A/B Testing: Balancing Data-Driven Success with Bold Innovation

“There’s power in the making. You can control the conversation and bridge the communication gap by making.” A B testing feels like a cheat code when it works. You get clarity. You get confidence. You get a neat little chart that says the decision is “obvious.” Ryan Leffel, Head of Design at Priceline, came to Berlin to talk about why that same superpower can quietly trap teams in over-optimisation, fear of risk, and a slow drift away from bold product thinking. Ryan borrowed the line from Mark

Data Science at The New York Times

“Optimising for the right thing is a good idea. Optimising for the wrong thing is a bad idea.” Chris Wiggins began with an image that felt nostalgic and slightly brutal. The original New York Times experience was a newspaper, a “dead tree” spread across a kitchen table. Readers navigated by memory and layout. Digital changed that. On 22/01/1996, the Times launched its website, and the product became a set of experiences across desktop, mobile, apps, audio, and a bundle that includes Cooking, G

The Holistic Product Journey: Redefining Design’s Role in Cross-Functional Teams

“There’s power in the making. You can control the conversation and bridge the communication gap by making.” The Problem Is Not Talent, It’s Being Stuck Christina Goldschmidt is redefining design’s Role at Warner Music Group, framing “being stuck” as the real enemy of product teams. Not lack of effort, not lack of smart people, but the absence of customer driven vision and insight-driven strategy that teams can actually use. She referenced the work of Marty Cagan and the Silicon Valley Product

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