Agenda

Utopia built a centralized platform that powers a set of new services for all stakeholders of the music industry, from creation to consumption. Building tech for an entire industry can only be achieved by looking holistically at the industry's value chain. In this session, Nicholas will discuss how Utopia are building a new product ecosystem - a growth partner to an industry in a highly innovative time of change. Nicholas will look at the challenges and successes as they strive to achieve a utopian experience for the music industry.

• Start/Position: Creating new revenue streams in an established market - Determining the Utopia growth partner positioning: Enabling the platform to provide services that enables all partners to grow
• Structure: Complexities in building the core platform that powers distributed services to cover the whole value chain
• Accelerate/Scale: Growth direction through both organic and programmatic M&A
• Integrate: What is the right way to bring acquisition technology into your portfolio
• Mature: Creating an ecosystem of products: Defining the product portfolio strategy

Designers spend the first few years fine-tuning their craft, earning their stripes. One of the challenges a team faces is the need to figure out what to build that goes beyond execution.

In this session, Emmet will discuss the changing role of design and how it can change as your company scales and your career grows, the product vision which used to come from the top to a point where the long-term strategy and vision falls on the product team. Emmet will discuss how to best prepare for this new skillset and design for longer term vision over immediate execution.

There are a number of ways technology companies scale fast. Scaleups that acquire other companies achieve their goals faster than those who grow organically, however they have mammoth culture, team and product integration complexities. Those who have grown organically, that culture and process that helped define their launch can be one of the hardest things to scale. Leaders of these companies are under pressure to determine which elements are worth preserving, how they align with the forward-looking business strategy, and how to define and foster that's ideal as the organization expands and integrates new people into the ranks.

• Integration of acquisition: How you bring that into your portfolio
• How do you manage that coupled with organic growth
• Balancing short and long-term vision

Process gets a bad name because we think of the restrictive processes that are forced on teams. But processes enable us to take advantage of things others have learned so that we don't have to re-invent the wheel.

In this forum, we'll talk through the different methodologies that teams are using, the principles behind them and how people are trying to push their companies forward.

Every idea relies on multiple assumptions. But testing assumptions isn't always easy. How do you come up with the quickest and cheapest experiments that you can run to validate your assumptions?

Join this forum to talk all things guerilla testing, interviewing techniques, validation approaches and more.

Good research can help avoid the most expensive risk in product development - building something that customers don't want.

But everyone thinks their ideas are good so how do you convey the value of research? And when you get some funding how do you prove the benefits so that you can continue to invest in research?

The role of the Product Manager is different in almost every organisation. How are teams structured? Is there one Product Manager per development team or does a Product Manager set the objectives for many teams? If you have hundreds of product managers do you have hundreds of product visions? How do Product Managers ensure that work isn't being duplicated across the organisation? Is it mostly project management?

If you are having issues defining the remit of the Product Manager role, or you just want to hear how others are doing it, this is a forum not to be missed.

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It seems like every day there is a new frontend framework released. But do they solve the problems that teams are facing on a daily basis?

Join this debate to learn the pros and cons of hydration, resumability, streaming and more to uncover the benefits and drawbacks of different frameworks and help you decide where to focus next.

We all have great ideas but getting them converted into action. In this talk, Rory will share some methods to transform your way of working.

In this session, Niall will discuss how to develop a deep understanding of different audiences goals, needs, behaviours and then designing/building products toward addressing those. Niall will talk through the complexities of getting internal alignment across a large complex organisation for shared goals + opportunity spaces using the discovery framework. Topics to discuss include;

• Bringing clarity on your company goals, strategy, and purpose creates the necessary space to focus on your consumer
• Consumer expectations & behaviours with brands has evolved; have we?
• Understanding how people behave in the physical world to shape the ecommerce experience
• Prioritisation: Aligning a complex global organisation around the most relevant opportunities

Modern work requires intrinsic motivation. In this panel, we will look at how the role of a leader is changing across all areas of a business and how people can learn the new skills they need to be effective leaders. From Recruitment, Onboarding, Motivating, Empowering, Managing Performance

Serverless computing is more than just "someone else's server.” Correctly applied, it can speed up your time to market and reduce costs - but it requires a new way of thinking about software.
In this talk, David will share key learnings from his upcoming book, The Value Flywheel Effect with IT Revolution. During his tenure with Liberty Mutual, a Fortune 100 company, they shifted their mindset to stop building commodity products and learn to leverage the true potential of serverless.

1. How to identify what are good candidates for serverless
2. How to Wardley Map the future candidates
3. Identify the inertia stopping migration and how to deal with it
4. Tackling the skills and mindset gap
5. The wins

Most of the discussion and advice for work-life balance tends to focus on individual, team or company contexts. But what if other factors, like our upbringing, mattered as well? This fireside brings to the stage the career journey of Pamela Mead, an executive leader and a mother. Joining Pamela on stage will be her daughter Claire, who is at the start of her career studying Astrophysics. This is an “Ask me Anything” interview with mother and daughter, diving into the nuances of leadership decisions and the personal cost of those decisions that burden all of us and how they impact family dynamics. More interestingly, this session will give us insights into how great leadership is perceived from the child's perspective and how that influences the working model they choose.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast! But what exactly is a company's culture, how does it influence how you get things done and how do you go about influencing the company culture to enable better product development?

Join this forum to discuss different culture types and the techniques that people use to influence change.

The reality of building products is that you can never get everything done = priorities shift, resources are reallocated, and funding is scarce. An effective product prioritization process garners support from stakeholders, inspires a vision in your team, and minimizes the risk of working on something that nobody wants. This session is an opportunity to discuss the challenges, successes, and pet peeves you have with prioritization and get to know how other people approach it.

What's worse than no research? Research that sits on a shelf unused!

Research needs to be timely, available and easily digested to be useful. Join this forum to talk about the different techniques and formats that you use to make sure that your research ends up being used.

Serverless is one of those words that has almost lost its meaning, but it represents a different way of creating value. Product teams are adopting the "You build it, you run it" approach so it is critical to reduce the operational burden and focus on business outcomes, not low-level tech.
Join this forum to talk about the steps that teams can take to move up the stack and work the cloud providers harder, which will let teams focus on building products.

With a typical organisational structure as you climb the ranks you need to change your career from being a maker, an individual contributor on a team, to a manager, looking after other people. This is effectively a career change as it is a very big shift in day-to-day work and requires a completely different set of skills.

In this forum, we will explore the alternative ways that companies are offering more career options to people and how they can avoid the career change progression if they want to.

SOLID had a good run. But now some of these points like Don't Repeat Yourself are being seen as an anti-pattern because premature abstractions can cause more problems than repetition. So what are the modern principles that should replace SOLID? And how do they apply to modern software stacks? If you are interested in the craft of software development, join this forum to dig deeper into the modern development environment.

Everything is getting an Ops these days. But what is involved and do we really need centralised teams? Join this forum to discuss what ResearchOps and DesignOps are, who is involved, do they recommend or mandate items, and what the future looks like.

Strategy means different things to different people. But having a clear strategy can help to align teams on what to focus on, and more importantly what NOT to focus on.

In this forum, we will chat about the different structures that teams use to create and share their strategy, how to ensure that the strategy aligns with the business goals, how to avoid feature lists, and how to keep the strategy in sync as things change.

Companies are competing with each other for top technical and in-demand skills, and with the shrinking size of future generations, the technical skills shortage is only going to worsen, resulting in high turnover and skilled employees having their pick of roles, leaving companies to scramble in order to fill the gaps. In this presentation, Alexandra will focus on the case study of building out a UX Research team from scratch within a subsidiary of US Bank, where she hired all entry-level and junior roles with the intent of mentorship and training. She will make a case for other companies on why this strategy has a significant return on investment. During the presentation, Alexandra will walk through:
-Her hiring process mentorship-management style
-Key insights she gained from the incoming Gen Z workforce
-The personal and business benefits she experienced by hiring a predominantly untrained team.

Valuable data is being collected every day by team members across the organisation. However data is only as good as how easy it is to consume. In this panel we will discuss the ways that teams are managing the storage of research data, how it is synthesised, how it is distributed so everyone can access and how data privacy concerns are addressed.

A lot of organisations are business centric - focusing on profit and revenue. But that isn't how customers think - they care about the jobs they are trying to do and the problems they are facing. In this panel, we will discuss the techniques people use to balance different needs and demands of stakeholders at all levels of product development.

As the value of high-quality research is being acknowledged in companies this is leading to researchers being placed within decentralised product teams. But how do you ensure that these people have the support that they need to be able to deliver effective research considering the breadth of skills and techniques required in modern research?

Building a product that anyone can use comes with inherent challenges. Kevin will talk you through the steps he took to become more customer-centric. He'll offer insight into:

1. The cultural context
2. How usability labs enabled them to understand language and culture differences
3. How they were able to increase loyalty at point of sale
4. How how these changes fit in with the undercurrent of a large merger

Learning about the latest and greatest techniques are great. But what really matters is how you get those changes implemented in your companies. This panel will discuss the main tactics for demonstrating the value of process improvements as well as tips on how to get buy-in at both a senior stakeholder level as well as within the product development teams.

In this forum we will discuss the pros and cons of different frontend frameworks, the challenges encountered as you scale and what the future can hold.

Design debt is the sum of all the imperfections of the user experience and design processes that appear over time due to innovation, growth, and lack of design refactoring. Accumulating Design Debt over time is natural and happens to every product. The key is to recognise, understand, and manage it properly. This forum will give you an opportunity to discuss all things Design Debt (UX, visual and operational), its causes, and its consequences

In the past, the manager would give the orders and the teams would follow them. It's an easy management model, it just isn't effective when working in a dynamic environment and it turns out people don't like to be managed that way either.
Modern leaders need to motivate, empower and encourage teams to do their best work. This is a new set of skills for many. In this forum, we will talk through the ways that leaders are supporting their teams to empower them to build great products.

A recent survey highlighted that Product and UX people see themselves as being responsible for a lot of the same things: discovery, user interviews and testing. What are the roles of UX and PM? How do people manage the relationship? Do we need both roles?

Design debt is the sum of all the imperfections of the user experience and design processes that appear over time due to innovation, growth, and lack of design refactoring. Accumulating Design Debt over time is natural and happens to every product. The key is to recognise, understand, and manage it properly. During this workshop, Alicja will break down the Design Debt definition, its types (UX, visual and operational), its causes, and its consequences.

• Introduction - why should we think about Design Debt and use it more consciously?
• Design Debt definition
• Design Debt symptoms: How to recognise that Design Debt is getting out of control in your organisation
• Types of Design Debt - UX, visual and operational
• Measuring Design Debt: qualitative and quantitative methods (brief overview)
• Paying off Design Debt:
• Step 1: Analyse and List
• Auditing Design Debt
• Overrecognising Design Debt
• Step 2: Prioritise and Plan
• Impact-effort matrix
• Incorporating Design Debt issues in the roadmap
• Step 3: Pay off and Track progress
• Using Design Debt strategically
• Maintaining a sustainable level of Design Debt
• POCs and MVPs - using Design Debt to test ideas
• Incorporating thinking about Technical and Design Debt into workflows
• The opportunity cost

This hands-on workshop will discuss, analyse, and help you build components within Figma. Understand where complexity starts and stops within a Figma component and learn that sometimes we need to reduce complexity to encourage adoption. Attendees will be asked if they'd like to share their own components for analysis during the session for enhanced learning.
Topics Luis will address include:

• Discussion: Design systems aren’t working
• Game: Name that component!
• Task and discussion: Build a component
• Analysis of task and discussion
• Looking at your components and discussion

As the industry moves from large build-it-all Waterfall releases to smaller, more iterative releases the ability to identify the underlying problem that you are trying to solve will be critical to designing simple and evolving solutions that can be tested and verified with your customers. This workshop takes you through essential practical steps.

This Masterclass looks at how organisations with advanced design applications including automotive, aerospace, marine, industrial and big data can leverage Design Systems

Through real-world use cases, plus showing tools, techniques, methods we'll examine how to reduce cost and time to assemble and operate digital products and platforms at a larger scale by using design systems.

We'll aim to answer:

How can advanced technology businesses master multi-team design at scale?
How to reduce time and cost to assemble and operate digital platforms?
What does best-practice design systems look like?
How to deliver consistency of UX without constraining creativity of UI?
How to curate and grow design systems - method and models?

We’ll look at how to structure design systems, components, patterns and how to work with data visualisation. We’ll explore best practices, guidelines, principles and frameworks underpinning effective design systems at enterprise scale.

Do you want to know how Amazon have been building and releasing products? In this workshop, Daria will share some insights about the working backwards process that is used to build customer centric products in Amazon by going through the process of writing a press release and product discovery. She will walk attendees through the details of interactions between PMs, UX and engineering and guide them in practical learnings based on her personal experiences at AWS.

As the industry moves from large build-it-all Waterfall releases to smaller, more iterative releases the ability to identify the underlying problem that you are trying to solve will be critical to designing simple and evolving solutions that can be tested and verified with your customers. This workshop takes you through essential practical steps.

Moderated user research is a powerful method for Designers, Researchers, and all those working on improving designs, to really understand their audience’s perspectives. The sessions can be wildly different, depending on topic, interviewee and moderator. A benefit, and, in order to uncover valuable and actionable insights, you want to perfect the art of moderating.

Join this interactive workshop with researchers from UserZoom and SAP to practice and hone your moderation skills in groups and breakout rooms. It will be an engaging and insightful session for everyone in UX from beginner to advanced.

You will leave the workshop being confident in moderating, well prepared for your next session, and trusting that it can be enjoyable and insightful for the whole team. Topics Johanna and Ines will address include:

• Theory: Moderated user research, in person and remote
• Demonstration: How not to moderate
• Discussion: Common pitfalls
• Theory: How to optimise your moderation
• Exercise: What great moderation looks and feels like
• Demonstration: How to moderate correctly and collect deep and valuable insights
• Summary & taking the insights to your team

When it comes to understanding your customer experience and working towards your KPIs, it’s not always easy to know where to start. What experiments should we run? What should we add to and prioritise on the roadmap? Are customers actually engaging with that new feature we launched? The difficulty in answering these questions is due to the data available having holes and more often than not is dispersed across multiple tools.

It’s imperative that your teams have access to ‘human readable’ data that allows you to empathise with your customers to better understand what's working, where they are getting frustrated and what features they want.

In this session you will learn how you can turn your data into actionable insights to improve your overall user experience and reach your company goals. Whether you’re looking to increase conversion, improve retention or boost engagement.

Outcome
You’ll walk away with:

• Tools and tips on finding actionable insights to improve user experience
• Hands-on FullStory experience
• Learning from peers at other organisations

Agreeing on a Way of Working vision, and the principles that underpin it, helps teams to decide on, and get buy-in for, the best changes to make.
In this workshop we will cover:

• The different interpretations of efficiency
• The principles behind modern software development
• Defining a vision that incorporates those principles
• The best way to identify and implement improvements

Do you want to know how Amazon have been building and releasing products? In this workshop, Daria will share some insights about the working backwards process that is used to build customer centric products in Amazon by going through the process of writing a press release and product discovery. She will walk attendees through the details of interactions between PMs, UX and engineering and guide them in practical learnings based on her personal experiences at AWS.

Research shows that majority of people agree Team Building is a key part of a successful organisation. The workshop gives you a masterclass in facilitating a Team Charter Exercise within your teams, fostering co-creation and collaboration

• It helps enable social identity, something that has gone amiss within the Work from Home scenario. The team charter ensures, mechanisms to build teams and align values.
• For leaders, team building is integral, finding common ground and making it work-play to get to know your teams.

Legacy business strategy thinking is based on scarcity of resources and competition. Category Creation is a new lens on business strategy that helps you to dominate markets, generate user demand and empower talented teams.
In this workshop we will look at how to kickstart the process of Category Design with the following steps:

• Frame the problem
• Category Potential & Discovery (Better vs. Different)
• Name the Category
• Brainstorm & Name
• Claim the transformation/category
• Create a Point of View & Roadmap of Team Actions