Chris Grant

This session is designed to unfold the layers of integrating craft and operational excellence in every aspect of business operations and how the Preply team achieves unparalleled customer engagement and innovation at Scale. Using practical examples of results achieved at Preply, Chris will walk us through the essence of being design-centric, where craft meets operational scalability and innovation emerges from deep customer insights.

In a candid conversation, Chris will talk through his learnings and challenges in growing and building design teams in companies at different stages of hyper growth: previously at King Games and today at ed-tech phenom Preply. He will talk through the importance of establishing good design practices early in your career from the hindsight of wanting to "unteach" design behaviors early.
Chris will talk about how he is rebuilding his team from the ground up to ensure an empowered design team that has long-term thinking on demonstrating the true power that design can bring across the individual, team and company.

Nowadays, it seems like everyone says they "put their users first" and “user experience is everyone’s job” but, like “I should go to the gym”, there’s a chasm between intention and action. To create lasting change, you need to adjust a team’s behavior and reboot their mindset. The good news is that designing a new way of working is a lot like designing a product: just swap out your end users and swap in your team members.
Chris Grant from King has spent the last 5 years leading a "player-centered" revolution at King. In this talk, he'll give practical examples of how he's used his UX and Product toolbox with internal “team users” to motivate them to design, test and work as cross-functional teams united by player-centric goals.

• How to drive change in your teams
• What to do when it doesn't always work