Agenda

Developers are too valuable to have supporting production issues. But then again they might have caused the issues. Should developers have to triage the issues found? Is it productive to find issues in their code or unproductive dealing with other people's problems? In this talk you'll hear from a team who have taken end-to-end ownership and the rationale behind the decision.

Companies have historically used a list of customer needs to describe what customers want. But is that the best way to describe what customers value in a product? Are there different types of value that consumers experience and desire? How do we discover, describe, and design for these different types of value? How can we use these insights to create growth for the business?

Done is very contentious in teams. The definition varies based on the authority of the team - done can be at test sign off or at deployment. As teams move away from functional silos towards outcomes how does the definition of Done change? And what impact does this have on the way of working?

Site outages and incidents are par for the course for tech companies. Solving the root cause often involves tense conversations and high-pressure situations. The war room serves as a dedicated space where the most critical team members work through these issues, but what happens when everyone gets in the room?
The goal is clear, restore site service as quickly as possible, but there can be many approaches to getting there. In this talk, Rashi Khurana will share best practices in leading teams to troubleshoot issues and navigate incident resolutions. She will address communication strategies, people management, process implementation and managing retroactive evaluations.

In this debate our candidates will discuss:
Enforcing Good Design
Services Challenges
Total Cost of Ownership
Technical Debt

Most companies have decentralized business and product teams, which is usually good for autonomy and execution. But one decision made in isolation can seem right at the time, yet lead to a fractured user experience overall. How can companies optimise for responsiveness and reduce design entropy? This case study explains how we used design to implement system thinking into a 150-year-old bank.

This talk explores the journey of the Duolingo Stories product journey. With a team under pressure to produce results and an organizational culture that prizes rigorous AB testing, we'll explore how qualitative user research became part of our product development process, how it helped us build a product roadmap, and what we've learned along the way.

If UX Research is the ground floor of great product design, then talking to your customers is its foundation, essential to making sure you build something stable, that will last.

But good foundations don't come easy, they require excellent planning - before, after and during. What's the secret to a rock solid research plan? And how do guarantee we build the right thing?

How can we be more courageous and confident in the way we build products? The answer lies in the way we ideate, design, test, and refine--before any code is written. You'll learn how to run successful ideation sessions with your working team, trying on novel ideas and taking logical leaps into the future. You'll also come away with practical methods for prototyping your best design ideas for quick user feedback. The result is building more innovative and useful products with less risk.

As designers, we always set a high bar for ourselves and it can often feel like there's a gap between what we recognize as excellent and what we're able to produce in our own work. This talk will teach you three unconventional ideas that can help you close that gap and finally produce work you're happy with.

More and more companies nowadays are investing heavily in building infrastructure for developers and data scientists. But often, building infrastructure products are treated as pure engineering practices and differentiated from feature products.

I would like to share my experience leading a team at BuzzFeed in building user-centric infrastructure products for our developers and data scientists, and how I integrate and adapt traditional PM techniques for technical products.

Building software for our peers is a double-edged sword. On one hand, our users are technologists themselves and have immense appreciation for well-designed infrastructure and tools. On the other hand, it is very tempting for us as developers to make assumptions about those folks with whom we work closely. When building tools for data scientists, it is especially crucial to keep in mind that they have their own distinct workflows and needs.

In this session Stephen McCarthy looks at how he delivers user-centered products in the Government Digital Service in the UK.

In this session Frederic will look at how to manage feature-flipping and A/B Testing when shipping on multiple platforms. How to manage synchronization and coordination with product marketing and as part of it, explain how Dashlane are organized with a dual track approach to support feature team delivery and platform/production maintenance in parallel.

In this session Marcel will be looking at your can achieve product market fit and deliver on their projects using autonomous teams.

Bakers don't farm the fields and mill the grain yet product teams are still worrying about the full stack of their solutions, right down to operating system patches and memory limits.

This hands on session will look at how easy it is to incorporate cloud services and infrastructure as code into your applications and how to take advantage of existing services so you can focus on your business logic and differentiator.

Success is the ability and willingness to change. Everything starts and ends with people, so show that you care. Your product team members need to feel and act like they are partners in crime. Dare to adapt your leadership style based on team needs and their maturity. Sometimes you will need to lead or guide them, and sometimes it will be better to just leave them alone. Organisational design is more important than you think. Choose the model that will allow you to deliver a holistic user experience @ scale. Only by optimising for both value and delivery, you will be able to minimise the waste and deliver the RIGHT thing FAST.

Product managers and design leads often get asked to define the vision for a product or service, but rarely does anyone agree on what that looks like. A vision should not only connect to business strategy, it should be stable enough to withstand new learnings and pivots across the product lifecycle. The hard part is in making it tangible enough to be actionable, without falling into the trap of big Design. This talk will uncover how a collaborative partnership between product, design, and tech can help shape a tangible vision, that can empower and inspire teams.

"None of us is as smart as all of us"
Culture is one of those intangible things. We all recognise what a good team culture looks like - team members collaborating, sharing knowledge and supporting each other.

Creating the conditions where a strong team culture can thrive is challenging. What approaches can we take to set up our teams for success and help instil and grow a culture of leadership at all levels?

Today's technology has made it easier than ever to simplify experiences. With the touch of a finger, you can do almost anything. Changing habits, however, is a different story. This conversation will dig into the different ways you can use the power of automation, not only to change customers' behaviour, but the process behind the scenes-how the development of squads can balance KPI and user centricity, as well as lifecycle and service focus, using transparency to fuel product and feature development cycles, OKRs and rituals.

In software there are two key types of work - discovery and delivery. However, that doesn't mean there are different people doing those jobs. If the whole team is responsible for product success, not just getting things built, then the whole team needs to understand and contribute to both kinds of work.

Dual track agile and the UXDX model both convey the approach of design and development working together.

How do you communicate the goals of your customers with your team and with the wider organisation? With customer journey maps, you can get a sense of your customers' motivations, their needs and pain points. But where do you start? How do you design effective maps that can push your team forward?

We've probably all been asked to come up with a set of software estimates for a project with very little detail, very little time to do it and plenty of quizzical looks when it's given. Writing software is very rarely like painting a room, where a person can reasonably give an estimate to the nearest day.
Between tech debt, lack of useful documentation and a new requirement never done before, it is very hard for a software team and the lead developer to come up with what the business often wants - an accurate estimate! (if such a thing were possible).
So, what is the solution? Storypointing, MVPs, spikes and an iterative approach all help towards a goal of better software estimation and therefore the success of a project, but the best, single most important element I have seen is the existence of trust between a software team and product owner. On the product owner, that they won't make promises to the business based on estimates and on the software team, that they will give an honest assessment of the work involved and not inflate estimates.
When it works it is a powerful thing and is a million times more effective than the 'them' and 'us' attitudes that exist in some places and that do nobody any good.

Successful products deliver on both the customer and the business needs, but aligning the two can be challenging. Maintaining alignment while the team deals with the complexities of implementation even more so.

How can teams map their activities back to the business and customer KPIs?

This exciting discussion looks at managing remote teams, outsourced dev teams, global talent shortage plus much more!

When teams move to outcomes they need to be able to confirm that their work has delivered on the expected benefits and not some external factor. As teams scale up their releases, managing the number of concurrent tests becomes more difficult.

This session will look at how to build and scale an experimentation culture that can run hundreds if not thousands of tests a year.

How do you achieve strategic alignment in your organization? In this session, I will go over how I use user story mapping as a way of aligning everyone from SMEs to engineers on what we're building, why we're building it and most importantly how we should prioritize work. By using this throughout the development process, companies can achieve strategic clarity, as well as better, and more successful products.

Are process and culture interdependent on each other? What do engineers do differently that non-engineers can benefit from? How can we ensure we maintain passion and creativity while working among larger teams and organizations? This session will dive into unique op-mechs and collaboration methods to foster team culture, increase engagement, improve productivity, and help create more empathy between designers and developers.

I am very aware that going against years of indoctrination on UCD is controversial, but hear me out.
The world is going through a paradigm change. During decades as product designers all we were told to care about was to fulfil users needs and cater for their individualism. But that practice has created a few unexpected outcomes that go beyond the product itself.
What about if by solving a User Centered issue we created a huge systematic, environmental or socioeconomic problem?
What can we do to design better products that are more harmonious to the planet and its habitants?

From the very beginning of Algolia's journey, focusing on Developer Experience was key. More than 6 years later with four dedicated squads on that topic, it couldn't be even more true.
In this talk we'll look at how giving developers the tools they'll love to use results in a massive impact on the experience of the end users. We'll dig into how the combination of key product enablers, available pre-packaged best practices and good documentation can contribute directly to it

UAT is challenging because you need a production-like server with production-like data. With the challenges of data protection as well as maintaining server consistency, wouldn't it be easier to use production?

How do you ensure that users don't see bad code? What about database changes? Find out the answers to these questions and more

The future of Uber is far from determined, and the decisions and actions of Gough will help define it."The core of design is empathy. That's the starting point no matter what. That will always be how you address any product challenge. The classic way products were developed was you solved functional needs, and then maybe business needs, and then you lean heavily into human needs over time. This arc, all of the [PR] challenges aside, is a natural arc. The next big step is to become a company that's really, really good at connecting with people and people's needs."

How do you build a design system which supports a fast-paced, autonomous squad culture and works on more than 45 different platforms? How do you govern such a system? How do you handle contributions? Spotify has been on a journey reimagining what a Design System looks like for us. We're still on our journey but have scaled a steep learning curve, made mistakes and occasionally, found great success and we're ready to share our newly acquired knowledge with the design community.