Library

The What & Why of Continuous Discovery

Most product teams are starting to adopt discovery best practices (e.g. interviewing customers, usability testing, experimenting). However, many of us are still stuck in a project world. We do research to kick off a project, we usability test right before we hand off to engineers, and our primary means for experimenting is a/b testing. These methods are better than nothing, but the best product teams are shifting from a project mindset to a continuous mindset.
In this talk, we’ll explore the key differences between project-based discovery and continuous discovery and give your team a clear benchmark to aspire to.

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How We Manage Releases at Minecraft

During the past year we've explored a new approach to Minecraft release management, with concepts such as Minimum Lovable Product and four levels of Done.
In this talk I'll show how it works and what we've learned.

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The Impact of Research Beyond the Report

As researchers, we're often asked to consider the impact of our work. When you think about impact, what comes to mind? Maybe you’re thinking about looking at how click-through-rate or conversion improved after a product launch, or measuring the sentiment of our customers to see if they’re happy with a product. You may even measure impact based on the number of projects you’ve worked on or features that have shipped. But what about all the intangible ways to measure impact — all the times that research impact might have felt more invisible, but you’re certain that it was there?

In this talk I’ll share on how to identify, measure, and improve the intangible impact that research has on your team. You will learn techniques on how to:

• build authentic relationships with your team;
• educate team members on the role/value of research; and
• ensure that your research can live on beyond the report

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A/B Testing At Scale

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.

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The Design Operating Model: A Framework For Building And Maturing Your Design Team

Every design team should be tailored to the unique culture and needs of the company it serves. However, there are common components that form the basis of a Design Operating Model which can be used to drive, and measure, the maturity of your design team.
In this session, Richard will share the basis of the Design Operating Model along with real-life examples from his career building and evolving design teams in 4 fortune 100 companies.

• How to build your design team
• How to create a Design Operating Model

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Launching A Cultural Phenomenon: The Next Phase For Niantic Post Pokémon Go

Phil’s is known for being CTO & founder of Niantic Inc, creator of Google Earth & Pokemon GO, and his contributions to Gmail, Google Maps & Street View.

Before Niantic, Phil co-founded Keyhole, and led the development of Earthviewer which when acquired by Google in 2004, became Google Earth. Niantic was formed as a project within Google, but it went out on its own & became a startup in 2015.

Their objective is to use emerging technologies to enrich human experiences in the physical world. Pokemon GO is the company’s biggest success to date.

The augmented reality game is one of the most successful mobile-gaming apps to date as it grows closer to 1 billion downloads and over $1.2 billion in revenue.

But Niantic has no intention of slowing down, late last year, they secured $200 million in funding and announced a Harry Potter augmented reality game which is expected to release later this year. It is currently under active development and we may even have audio integrated into the A.R. experience.

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Shaping The Work

Ryan will talk about how designing at the right level —shaping—enables Basecamp to ship projects more regularly and increase the collaboration between designers and programmers.
Using concepts from his book Shape Up, Ryan will give you language and perspective to rethink the way you design and execute projects.

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Dual Track Agile

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.

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Designing For Development: Building A Design System At Brainly

Design Systems offer an opportunity to consolidate processes, improve collaboration and speed up product delivery.
In this talk, Patrycja will guide us through the journey of how a small team from Brainly sparked a design system revolution in the world of developers. The talk will also share the struggles on the way to establishing a full blown Design System for a small team that develops the product for millions of users.

• How your team can improve collaboration
• How to speed up product delivery
• How to establish a Design System in your company

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Definition Of Done

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?

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Saying No To Features

Alice Newton-Rex, Chief Product Officer, WorldRemit discusses why it's important to focus less on building features and more on the outcome of the user you're building for.

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Creating A Tangible Product Vision

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.

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Data Enabled Design

Understanding the Data Enabled Design team, part of Philips Design. This new competence team aims at making data and artificial intelligence part of the creative process and deliver on meaningful propositions that encompass data and AI. In this session Eva will elaborate on the need for this competence; the needed skills, expertise of designers and collaborations with data scientist, analysts and developers; the methodologies and tools we develop; illustrated with examples.

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Should you start with Microservices?

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

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How To Identify Your Customer's Needs

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?

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Merging Teams At Buzzfeed: 6 months, 4 crises, 7 lessons.

Enabling cross-functional product teams can be a daunting task because its not just about the work but also the politics involved. And as CTO of Buzzfeed, is what Peter Wang faces.
In this session, Peter Wang will reflect on his first six months as BuzzFeed CTO of a cross-functional team, and the 4 challenges he faced: health, economic, social, and attrition.
He hopes to turn his renewed perspectives such as building trust as a new leader, finding your voice during a crisis, to new way to think about retention, and more. He can’t promise it’s exactly seven lessons, but it’s more than three.

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Scaling Design at SumUp

As companies grow in scale with distributed teams around the world it is important to have embedded designers and researchers in your organisation. Keeping momentum, alignment and customer focus to maximise business outcomes requires scaling practices, frameworks and community.
Join Pamela as she shares her journey in leading the scaling of design within SumUp.

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3 Takeaways From Duolingo's Product Culture

Zan Gilani, Product Manager at Duolingo talks through 3 things that are important to the Duolingo product team and how you can apply them to your product or the project you're working on. With 300 million users, Duolingo is the most downloaded educational app of all time

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The Secrets And Synthesis Of Successful UX Research

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?

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Evolutionary Architecture And Systems Thinking

In this talk, Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks, will share how good architecture principles and forcing functions enable more empowered developers and more iterative solutions.
Rebecca will touch on:

• What defines good architecture principles?
• How does design aligns with evolutionary architecture, and
• Examples of iterative solutions

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Scaling UX Research

How to deliver research and scale research capability across a large agile organization of hundreds of product and feature teams.
In this talk Jennifer and Kelsey from Fidelity Investments will focus on 3 key components:

• Research framework
• Organisational design
• Research democratisation

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Reimagining Design Systems At Spotify

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.

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Micro Frontend Architecture

Summarising 2 years of work in 30 minutes, Luca will introduce you to his vision of Microfrotnend architecture. Luca is Chief Architect at DAZN - the Netflix of sport. Luca will discuss from monolith to micro. What is a Microfrontend. The principles of Microfrontend and the technical implementations.

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Why User Centered Design Doesn't Work (Anymore)

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?

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The Technology Behind The Games

Building a scalable infrastructure for games which serve hundreds of millions of people is tough. But with each new game requiring slightly different features building that scalable infrastructure multiple times becomes impossible. In this talk Steven will share how his team works with all of the different game teams to build a shared infrastructure that empowers the game developers without restricting their ability to innovate.

• Defining the central technology product
• Handling requests from multiple different stakeholders
• Managing the big risk - lack of adoption
• Keeping the platform lean and agile

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Kessel Run: A Digital Transformation Story Within The World's Largest Bureaucracy

There are few enterprises in the world that might find it tougher to become Agile and build software rapidly than a large Government organisation such as the US Air Force. But that's exactly the challenge Adam is solving through the Kessel Run project. Adam and the team are currently averaging about four months (124 days) to get a technology product from an idea on a whiteboard to operational - a task that normally would take 8 years. In his inspiring talk, Adam will talk us through his approach to becoming agile including; The problem and complexity of becoming Agile in a government Waterfall environment  Dealing with constraints; Understanding that not everybody will (or wants to) get onboard with becoming Agile - how to get around it. The structure and approach taken: Successes and lessons to date.

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A Whole Team Approach To Testing In Continuous Delivery: One Tester's Journey

It’s not uncommon for teams moving towards continuous delivery to face a growing backlog of customer-reported bugs. It’s a challenge to maintain the cadence of frequent deployments. If a team has testers, they’re often expected to continue to do all the testing activities, without any thought as to how those fit into continuous delivery (CD) or continuous deployment (also CD). Teams without testing specialists often struggle with insufficient automated test coverage and inadequate exploratory testing.

In this session, Lisa shares her experiences with a team striving to deploy smaller changes more frequently. Her team’s challenges are common ones. They came up with some innovative experiments to find ways to deploy more frequently with confidence. Lisa will introduce some techniques to consider trying, including:

• Visualizing deployment pipelines to shorten feedback loops and fit in testing activities
• Using a test suite canvas to determine the minimum automate test
• Ways to analyze risks and determine next steps to mitigate them
• Ways testing specialists contribute to team success

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From Visual Design to Vision Design: The role of Product Designers in shaping product direction

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.

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Dual Track Development: Involving The Whole Team In Discovery And Delivery

Development work focuses on predictability and quality while discovery work focuses on fast learning and validation. Discovery and development are visualised in two tracks because it’s two kinds of work and two kinds of thinking. It is vital to involve the whole team in discovery tasks wherever possible and keep discovery work and progress visible to the whole team.
In this session, Agile Expert Jeff Patton will discuss how to involve the whole team in discovery and delivery. He will also discuss:

• How to keep measuring and learning even after you ship
• Two tracks, not two teams

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How To Empower Developers To Build A Greater User Experience

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

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Incremental Metrics: Getting Your Kpi's Right

In this discussion, Natalia and Paula discuss teamwork and metrics at Trimble.

Panelists:
Natalia Kaijalainen, Engineering Manager, Trimble
Paula Hellemaa, User Feedback Program Manager, Trimble

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A Comprehensive Guide To A Successful Design Delivery While Building A Design System

The design-to-development stage often is a major source of friction in even the most mature of product teams. Stemming that traditionally, designers and developers perform different tasks when it comes to product development. But what happens when friction is reduced and design handovers are successful?

Following the journey of building the design system at Disney Streaming, Davy will talk through how they established a successful relationship between, design, engineering & product by creating a unique design delivery process. He will touch on:

• What a successful design delivery looks like;
• Understanding what the limitations of designers & engineers are;
• The importance of touchpoints to improve overall communication; and
• How this process has improved team dynamics and the product overall

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WebRTC in the Trenches – A Survival Guide

This is the story of how I built a WebRTC app to help people connect for 1-on-1 video chats during the pandemic.
A tale of product learnings, technical decisions, and lots of conversations!

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How Research Informs Design

UX embodies a multitude of disciplines from research to development each with their own processes and goals. Take a closer look at the relationship between the research and design of products through project examples, hand-off expectations, business challenges, and end-user experiences to better understand how research insights and findings impact and inform the design of a product.

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Security and Privacy when Building Great Products

While often tackled separately, security and privacy are two sides of the same coin and offer external implications for the company and internal complexities which leaves it as one of the biggest challenges facing tech teams today. Frederic will give key insights on how Dashlane think as an organization about privacy and how internal decisions have translated to how it is delivered to the customer. Federic will provide scenarios on how privacy and security are reflected in the technical stack.

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Influencing Organisational Culture

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.

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How To Get To Your Customers Underlying Needs?

This interactive session will look at how to understand your customers needs by learning their patterns and behaviours. Once you've gotten insights to this, how do you put them into action.
Join the conversation, share your insights and probe the speakers on the elements of their talks that left you wanting more.

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From Output to Outcome: Driving Cultural Change in Product Teams

Transitioning from output-driven KPIs to outcome-driven goals requires more than frameworks—it demands cultural transformation. Learn how Eneco redefined success by embracing continuous discovery and delivery, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and putting customer value at the core. Jay will discuss the challenges, breakthroughs, and lessons learned in creating a customer-centric and value-driven organization.

• Transitioning team and org KPIs from output to outcome
• Building a customer-focused culture across product, design, and engineering
• Lessons from implementing frameworks like Opportunity Solution Trees

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Establishing a User Centered Design Culture Throughout the Organization

A user-centered approach for product teams should be a procedure deeply rooted in the organizational culture. However this is not the case in a lot of organisations with siloed teams and departments who struggle to structurally shift an organization’s value to the users.

Moderated by Richard Dalton, this panel outlines how to create and sustain a user-centered culture within a team and extend that throughout the organisation.

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Are your words working? Creating and sustaining a content-focused research practice

Your content team needs to be confident which specific words and phrases are resonating with your audience. And wouldn’t it be ideal to learn which words work before you launch your project or product? In this energizing, hands-on session, you’ll learn methods and tools for objectively evaluating how your customers are reacting to your writing—and most importantly, why they’re responding the way they are.
This is not “regular” UX research with prototypes of both content and visual design. It’s content-only research that helps you pinpoint the just-right words for successful, friction-free user experiences and stronger business results.

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Undefended Leadership: Challenging the Now to Create the Next

The momentum is now moving more towards work becoming vocational, aligning to the passions inherent in an individual’s life. .The truth is the organisational paradigm hasn’t been challenged since Henry Ford. This results in widespread untapped potential, lack of innovation, choice bias and herd mentality. The behaviours that made us successful in the last 100 years are not those that will bring us forward and we need to work against our naturally disposition to only think in terms of our own lifetimes. , Paul discuss the challenges of being one of the first neurodiverse hires into a company, how we now need to think of ourselves and what we’ve learned in overcoming stigma and legacy working practices.

• A Framework for understanding an organisations personality
• The convergence of entrepreneurism and corporatism
• Teal organisations and empowering generalism
• Crossing the divide and staying same in the interim
• The results you can expect

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3 Learnings from KAYAK's Design System

Consistency in design is difficult, made more difficult when your design system supports several brands within different markets. So how did the team in KAYAK achieve this with a lean design team.
Follow Aleks and her teams journey as they built their design systems that services multiple global brands. She will touch on their learnings on:

• How they adapted and restructured the design system to support their current needs;
• Why a component based design system helped them best create consistent designs for multiple brands
• How to avoid bottlenecks when knowledge sharing by establishing the Ambassador System; and
• Any future improvement she envisages for the team.

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Human Centeredness At a Time of AI Amplified Business Metrics

We are catapulting into the era of AI automation - long in coming and now arriving with a bang. Design as a discipline has barely kept up with the good and bad of our product decisions. We have seen it in the scooters scattered around city centers, blocking pedestrians, or the recent podcast by Ezra Klein on the increase of teenage suicides and mental health closely linked to the increase in social media consumption.

We don’t believe it is solely the Designers’ role to think about the social responsibility or human impact of our product. Yet we do play a role and need to raise our voices if we think about the changes that are upon us.

The challenge we put forth: we - as Design - have drifted along with companies' short-term revenue focus, including processes around agility and automation. Design has adapted to it, but has rarely challenged it.

As we enter this AI future, Pamela and Ricardo will share their thoughts on embracing yet challenging AI with eyes wide open, while adapting to the rapidly changing reality of our day-to-day work.

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When 45% of Your Team Walks Out: Inside Wise’s Design Culture Reboot

Losing nearly half your team forces a reckoning. Josh Payton shares how Wise turned crisis into renewal, rebuilding its design organisation from burnout and late-night firefighting to a culture of autonomy, balance, and impact. Discover how mindset, maturity, and metrics turned attrition into advocacy.

Key Outcomes:

• Identifying the cultural and operational triggers that drive attrition.
• Learning actionable tactics for rebuilding trust and redesigning team workflows.
• Exploring frameworks that balance delivery pressure with long-term maturity.
• Seeing how transparency and empowerment rebuild both people and performance.

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Supergluing insights: How to make your research stick with stakeholders

From recruitment through to synthesis and insights, a lot of effort goes into the research process—but what happens next? If insights don’t stick with stakeholders, the overall impact of research is dramatically reduced.

Dovetail’s star Product Designer, Jodie Clothier, sits down with Adyen's Vice President of User Experience Katarina Bagherian to chat about how she makes research impactful for her stakeholders. In this session, Katarina will walk through four methods, drawn from education theory, that help make research output stick and drive outcomes. This session isn’t to be missed, and we’ll be finishing with a spicy fireside chat too!

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Q&A on Discovery

Lots of companies are implementing discovery but not all approaches are equal. In this Q&A Marty Cagan will be sharing his thoughts on Discovery:

• Who is involved?
• What is the goal
• When do you have enough insights?
• Rigid process versus judgement
• What are the bad practices that teams need to watch out for?

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Boosting Product Team Efficiency by applying research techniques to Developer Experience/Productivity

Join an engaging discussion on how the principles of developer productivity can be applied across the entire product team, including UX, design, and product management. Share and learn practical methods to enhance team-wide efficiency, reduce rework, and align efforts towards achieving better product outcomes.

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How To Experiment In A Zero Failure Environment

Building new products is hard and relies on the lean approach of fast experimentation and learning from failures. This is great in consumer products but how can you do this when working on mission critical solutions that can never be allowed to fail? What if you’re building tools for industries where people’s lives are put at risk if your product doesn’t work correctly the first time?
In this session Tom will talk through the challenges that the team at PlanGrid faced when launching a new product where failure isn't an option. Learn how a lean cross-functional team explored, built and started to earn multi-million dollars in revenue in a matter of months

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