UXDX Community:Dublin: How Modern Product Teams Are Changing

Opening thoughts and housekeeping.

Three Ireland has moved to an enterprise agile operating model. Daniel Heaslip shares how design work is now captured, prioritised and delivered, and what the shift to cross-functional squads has changed for design across the organisation.

Laura Montefusco has worked through three real stages of UX maturity, from being the first designer in an organisation with no design process, to working in an established enterprise design team, to joining a high-maturity product organisation. She will share a practical playbook for influencing UX maturity when you do not have formal authority.

What makes some teams thrive while others struggle? Often, it comes down to how well managers understand what motivates their people, shape roles around those motivations and create meaningful autonomy.

Using practical team examples, John Slattery will explore these three core ingredients and show how they can improve commitment, performance and collaboration. Attendees will leave with a simple framework for creating roles that work for both the individual and wider organisation, while giving people the ownership they need to do their best work.

The design process most of us learned — double diamond, linear discovery to delivery, user journey maps — is quietly being replaced. Not by a new framework, but by AI agents that research, ideate, prototype and iterate alongside designers in real time.

Drawing on his work at Microsoft, Tashfeen Ahmed shares what changed when AI agents became part of the day-to-day design workflow: research synthesis happening before kickoff is over, concepts generated while the problem is still being framed, and prototypes produced faster than a traditional brief can be written. He’ll explore how designers can work closer to code using AI coding agents without losing craft, intent or responsibility.

Janet Copeland, Director of Software Development Engineering at Workday, will share how AI is changing the way product and engineering teams operate inside a large organisation — from team structures and decision-making to the skills and ways of working becoming more important as AI becomes part of day-to-day product development.

As AI makes it easier for more people across an organisation to create, prototype and ship, the constraint increasingly moves away from tools and toward culture.

In this talk, Dónal O’Mahony, Product Design & UX Leader at Canto, explores what happens when everyone becomes a builder: how trust has to change, how roles and decision-making evolve, and how teams can avoid replacing old handoffs with a new kind of AI-driven chaos.

He’ll look at how leaders can create high-agency teams without losing alignment, where autonomy needs guardrails, and why culture may become the biggest advantage — or biggest blocker — as AI changes how products get built.

Wrap-up and transition to networking.

Networking with peers, with simple food and drinks at the end of the programme.