Agenda

When all your processes are made for large teams and embedded resources, what do you do when the team you've built has been pulled from underneath you? In this session, Kevin will discuss the growth of his team at Glovo and the approach taken post-forced downsizing - a time when research & experimentation are arguably most needed during a time of unchartered territory. Kevin will discuss the growth, the downsizing, lessons learnt and positive hindsights. With a goal of giving you the tools needed to show more empathy and make your UX team a strategic arm of business growth and maturity.

Downsizing. Reduction in Force. Discharges. Termination. These are realities that we are facing in difficult times. Laying off staff is always a challenging thing to do. Framing the decisions and tradeoffs requires deliberation, taking an emotional and cognitive toll.

But sometimes, the best thing for growth is a purposeful organization reshaping to focus on business needs. Joe Meersman has spent the last decade of his career building multidisciplinary teams to deliver experiences.

Join Joe to learn about a scalable process for forming effective teams, structuring them thoughtfully for maximum performance and results, addressing team culture during turbulent times, and building positive momentum to reach goals. You’ll leave this session with a better understanding of how to anticipate and manage obstacles with confidence.

Many companies today want to invest in AI / ML. What new types of roles and responsibilities do we need in this AI-driven environment? How does a company build cross-functional leadership with Product, Engineering and Design? How is Product Design as a discipline evolving? How do we ensure that human input is effective in influencing the outputs of Ai/ML

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.

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.

In this session, Muriel will discuss A-Z scenarios from her career span of having built multiple Design & UX departments in 5+ Startups:

From inception, through ROI & business cases, to crafting a full blown UXD department - and continuously proving their worth. She will also tap into the everlasting "Agile" topic: How to accelerate speed without jeopardizing quality for fast-paced teams (Startups & Corporations alike). At a time when UX departments are being absorbed by engineering, Muriel will discuss how to prove the case and turn UX into a commercial strategy for success.

Let’s say you’re hosting a dinner party. You've got a few sous chefs in the kitchen helping you prepare the meal. They're chopping vegetables, measuring ingredients, and doing their part to make the meal a success. But what if your chefs talked to your guests before the party to find out what they liked and wanted to eat? Equipped with these insights, your team could make more-informed culinary decisions, leading to an even more incredible guest experience.

Similarly, engineers can benefit from engaging directly with customers during the discovery process. But how do you get to a state where your engineers are completely bought in and where your product and engineering teams are working collaboratively to create value from the discovery process?

During this talk, Tim will cover:

• Two peas in a pod: Selling the value of cross-disciplinary discovery teams
• Recipes for success: Democratizing discovery data
• Easy as pie: Motivating engineers with the value from discovery outcomes
• You’ll walk out with a clear picture for how to get your Engineering teams involved in Discovery, so together you can create a meal that everyone will love!

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.

How do you account for bias? How do you identify how people really feel about your design or product? User Interviews can have a big reveal for the product team, but many researchers don't get usable feedback on questions. Worse still, feedback isn't part of the development process and valuable insights are often wasted. This session will discuss together the A - Z from facilitating better ssessions to how people are incorporating that better into the process

For better or worse, outsourcing is a fact of almost every product team. The challenge lies in questions like how do you decide what part of the product vision/execution do you outsource vs keep internal. This session will allow open conversation on what works for teams on top of exchanging ideas on how to best work with outsourced teams.

There are many opportunities where the online experience can fall apart when moving to in-person. In this session, Susan will discuss the challenges and successes for CarMax over the last few years as they build out a better online and offline experience for their customers.

Navigating uncertainty and remaining adaptable is critical for organizations to succeed in the modern world. Despite best efforts, planning cycles too often fail to align teams or to create conditions for the kind of company-wide flow required to thrive in our dynamic business environment. Everyone’s working hard. Everyone’s working smart. But meaningful progress still fails to manifest. In this session, Matt shares strategies for creating resiliency, real alignment, and flow across functions, and how to manage through the change that will inevitably complicate our best laid plans.

Are you searching for ways to ensure your design system stays relevant in the ever-changing digital landscape? Join T. Rowe Price's Beacon Engineering Lead as they share their insight on building a design system using a web standards-first approach.

• Discover the reasons behind their decision to pivot away from developing for multiple frameworks used at the firm and towards a more streamlined solution.
• Learn how utilizing browser standards such as web components, CSS variables, and more have helped increase throughput, consistency, and accessibility.
• Don't miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and strategies for creating a design system that remains adaptable while providing delightful customer and developer experiences.

Do you dream of a core set of personas that everyone (design, product, engineering) agrees on and uses at the highest level of product roadmap planning? DocuSign will pull back the curtain to share how a crucial shift in perspective to align personas to Jobs to be Done will help establish a shared understanding of customers and empower product teams to deliver experiences that matter.

As technology evolves, ‘new’ ways fast become ‘old’ ways. Adaptability is important to thrive in an ever-changing work environment. Being able to adapt to changing environments and work processes makes you a competitive job candidate and a strong overall professional. Our panelists will discuss the characteristics and actions that will help you adapt to a modern workplace, and become better at your craft, and a better leader.

Join us for a thought-provoking session that explores the benefits and drawbacks of centralizing service teams versus decentralizing them. The group will discuss how centralization can improve consistency, standardization, and cost-effectiveness, while also exploring the advantages of decentralization, such as faster response times, better customer service, and increased autonomy. Learn how to weigh the pros and cons of each approach and how to make informed decisions that align with your company's goals and culture. Don't miss out on this opportunity to gain valuable insights from other people in the audience and take your team to the next level.

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.

While product owners and user experience designers are usually knee-deep in solving customer-centric problems, the engineering teams that is tasked with building the solutions are too often getting second hand information with a lifeless set of requirements. Most engineers are highly customer-focused. They are constantly trying to get into the heads of the end-users to design effective solutions. This Forum discusses how engineers can get a better understanding of the customer’s needs, and how to be more better equipped to fully understand the problem they are solving.

Our Day 2 Host, David Hoang will set you up for the day as we kick off another exciting day

For the past five years, Kent has led several data visualizations programs at Google. He currently focuses on creating accessible data experiences that provide value and insights to everyone, regardless of their ability. In this session, Kent will spotlight key lessons learned while building accessible visualizations for Google products like Search, Fitbit, Loon, Quantum AI and Cloud. He will discuss techniques for generating awareness, building a community of experts and making a business case for data accessibility. Kent will share his group's accessibility-first approach to design and how standards can be used to empower teams to create better data experiences.

In my 10 years of career as a data professional, I have realized the most underrated, overlooked, yet possibly the most important skill as a Data Analyst is the ability to tell an impactful story with data. The most accurate model or the most sophisticated analysis is meaningless if one can't convince its benefits to the stakeholders. In today's fast paced world with shortened attention span, the ability to tell a concise and convincing story is crucial. In this presentation, I am going to talk about some structures and fundamentals of storytelling with data and delve deep into dos and don’ts of impactful storytelling. I’ll be talking from my experience as a Data professional, but I believe this skill is equally important for UX and Product.

There are so many products out there that claims to help Product Managers in our work. Which one do I really need and how do I choose them? Co-host of the Product for Product Podcast, I will share the must-have and nice-to-have tools that you want to look for, and a method to choose them.

People love to chase what's shiny and new - but everything is a tradeoff. A new framework might solve some of your existing problems, but it might have unintended consequences. How do you know when it's worth the time and investment to switch, or whether it's safer to stick with what you know.

Personas have long been a useful tool in a user-centered design process; With the popularity of the JTBD paradigm, there are calls in some corners to abandon personas, suggesting that JTBD has emerged as a more useful technique. This Forum will discuss a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of personas and the key behavioral considerations that are essential to good personas and that provide much needed guidance for interaction design and product strategy.

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.

Join us for an insightful discussion on how AI is transforming the landscape of product development. In this session, the group will discuss the current state of AI in product development, its potential applications, and how it is changing the way businesses innovate. Discover how AI-powered tools are enabling faster and more accurate prototyping, testing, and analysis, and how they are helping companies create more personalized and targeted products. Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from industry leaders and gain valuable insights on how AI can help take your product development to the next level.

As companies' UX offerings mature, so too do the capabilities, offerings and value it can bring to the product team. In this session, Duaa explores the approach to building out the UX function at Square banking, demonstrating how to take control over the growth and interaction between other disciplines that ensures you maintain control over the process, build a better understanding and ultimately get the best outcome for all.

Large enterprise companies are more than ever embarking on high-paced digital transformations and reinventions to stay relevant and competitive. In-house design teams have become a key part of those endeavours and as a result designers have tremendous opportunity to work on projects of exciting complexity, scope, and impact.

However, the reality of being an in-house designer supporting transformative change can often be a challenging experience. Managing complex stakeholders groups, educating and articulating the value of design, navigating intricate technical restraints; all while canvassing for the end-user. It's a lot to figure out!

In this 25-minute talk, Jeff will share what he's learned over the course of a decade navigating and working on complex projects for enterprise companies as both a designer and more recently as design director leading teams.

Are you a designer or design manager considering moving in-house, or are you currently working in environments of digital transformation and complex problem spaces? Then this talk will teach you how to take the tools, frameworks and concepts you use to design digital experiences in your day-to-day work and how to put those to work to help you navigate and persuade your way to becoming a more effective agent of change

Every product will contain some form of AI going forward. This poses two challenges for product teams: how to work with AI and how to work if there is AI.
How to work with AI
There is a big UI shift away from menus towards more prompt focussed applications. What are the new patterns that teams need to learn?
How to work if there is AI
Copilot is writing 40% of the code that people write. Generative UI apps are able to create Figma editable mockups from prompts. How will the roles within a team shift when AI’s can start taking on more of the work.