AJ King

Enjoy a warm welcome and an overview of the agenda with your gracious hosts

This interactive forum turns the keynote into a working session. Together, we will unpack what it really takes to replace sign offs with clear ownership, fast decisions, and high quality outcomes. We will explore the practical building blocks: defining decision rights, setting quality bars, running lightweight critique, and handling risk without reverting to approvals. Bring your real scenarios, blockers, and edge cases. You will leave with a set of patterns you can apply straight away, plus a few phrases and templates for aligning stakeholders and keeping momentum when trust is still being earned.

Behind every product is a person navigating career twists, self-doubt, and the messy reality of making research matter. UX researchers AJ King and Darcie Gomer swap stories about their very different paths into tech, share the highs, lows, and unexpected lessons from studying humans and being human in tech. Expect to hear what it really feels like to build credibility, face self-doubt, and find purpose in the work. Honest, funny, and refreshingly human.

Hiring today is broken. Candidates are getting filtered out by AI before a human even sees their application, and hiring managers are often relying on outdated methods that don’t assess the full potential of a candidate. This discussion will tackle hiring challenges from both sides of the table:
- How candidates can stand out despite AI screening and generic recruitment pipelines.

• Why skills, mindset, and cultural fit matter more than portfolios or take-home assignments, and how hiring managers can assess them effectively.
• How hiring managers can better brief recruiters to identify the right talent, even if they aren’t design or product experts.
• How teams are using AI and hiring tech effectively without missing top candidates or introducing bias.
• Real-world hiring strategies to improve hiring outcomes for both job seekers and hiring managers.

As we are called upon to create more and more digital solutions where previously a user would engage with another person but now the response is automated, we run the risk of alienating our users and losing the reassurance of a 2-way interaction. In this talk, AJ will talk through his approach to the discovery phase when automating processes, to ensure the right balance is struck between efficiency of process and usability of our products. This practical guide will walk you through the common pitfalls simply automating your current process will create, as well as look at the obscure ways experience breaking friction points pop-up when creating this kind of product. Join us to learn how to enhance your product's user experience by making automation feel less robotic and more responsive to human needs