Talks and schedule

Early registration

Round table discussions

Opening reception (light refreshments)

Registration and breakfast

Opening remarks

Designing & Delivering Products at the Speed of Change

We have all been there before. We have our processes, methods, and mechanisms in place for how to design and deliver products people love. But what happens when all of that is thrown out the window? When you are asked to deliver in half the time, with a quarter the the team size required, and across 15 different devices and platforms on day one into a highly competitive and saturated market?

We have all heard the term 'building the plane while flying it', but few leaders are equipped for the type of tools required for the tightropes and trapezes you will embark on. This was the task at hand when developing and launching Discovery+ to 25 million subscribers, across 13 countries and 12 languages.

In this talk, Shawn will discuss what you need to do to survive take-off, a trip around the sun, and bringing everyone together to succeed in designing, developing and launching a global streaming service in record time. Shawn will highlight key pitfalls and important areas to achieve success through adaptive intelligence, quick decisions and trade-offs that keep the customer and the company culture at the center focus.

Shawn will also share stories and examples of how he used collaboration tools and tactics, including using intuition and instinct with real time data to produce a Design led MLP (Most Lovable Product) that ultimately shifted the trajectory of the company and resulted in one of the largest media mergers in history.

Deciphering anecdotes and data

It's critical to talk to users. But users often say one thing and do another - or worse, do nothing at all. A big part of my journey at Volley has been figuring out how to decipher data in a world full of anecdotes. I want to share what I've learned and the principles we've put in place to help the team navigate multiple pivots.

Break (drinks and snacks)

Creating design in the Enterprise: The ServiceNow design journey

As a product leader, you speak the language of outcomes and realize the value of design in achieving product experiences that people will love. But what to do when there is no design function at your rapidly growing company? You showcase the power of design thinking in products you create. You learn from and work closely with the founder, who becomes your mentor. You take on the challenge to build a design function from the ground up. As demand for thoughtfully designed products increases, you purchase a design agency to accelerate the company-wide transformation. You create a design culture, and a studio to celebrate the creative, quirky, and down-to-earth team values. A vision takes hold on how to truly design at scale, platform-first. In time, all products across the company, now 10 times larger, are imbued with design teams, working together and contributing to a maturing design system. Coming back to the decades-old Platform UI, you lead a talented cross-functional team to deliver ServiceNow’s reimagined, all-new platform experience to thousands of the worlds largest companies: The Next Experience

Color and contrast for accessible interfaces

Accessibility is about ensuring people can perceive and operate digital interfaces. For sighted people, this can be a difficult problem to solve. There are a plethora of visual experiences and impairments, and solving for one person’s challenge may adversely affect another’s. In other cases, a solution may not actually help the people it is intended to help. For example, dark mode may seem reasonable for photophobia (light sensitive people). However, high contrast text in dark mode can result in optical glare, making text illegible. The way that we can solve for the complexities of individual visual experience is with color personalization.

In this talk, Nate will discuss the basics of the human visual system, color science, and how they relate to user interfaces. He will use examples from his work creating Adobe Spectrum’s color system in conjunction with their open source color tool, Leonardo.

Lunch

How to build a Cross Functional Team That Deepens Customer Relationships and Increases Sales

MX’s Chief Product Officer Brett Allred will discuss how organizations can close the chasm between departments by building a true cross-functional team that ensures products meet the needs of customers. This case study highlights how MX transformed both the culture and structure of the technology and product teams to drive more meaningful sales conversations, strengthen customer relationships, and increase sales.

Responsible Innovation During Crisis

Every design decision has the potential to include or exclude customers. Global Research emphasizes the contribution that understanding user diversity makes to informing these decisions, and thus to including as many people as possible. User diversity covers variation in capabilities, needs and aspirations. I’ll discuss how we use Global Research to prioritize what product teams really need to build well and understand if their designs have relative ease of use that translates well to non-US users. Global Research priorities addresses some of the most challenging problems facing our global users today. Topics covered: gender-neutrality in tech Europe, responsible innovation dissolved @ Facebook, Twitter blue check mark crisis, spotify joe rogan fiasco, FTX etc

Break (drinks and snacks)

Fixing product analytics: lessons from a frustrated Microsoft PM

Today, product analytics is broken. Product analytics helps product managers and UX designers by collecting different forms of data; however, deriving insights quickly and uncovering problem areas is often a stop gap for these tools. Trymata gives you all the data and the story to go with it to help you craft the best digital experience.

Enough with the Confetti: How to design delight by infusing your product with brand attributes rather than a sprinkle of magic pixie dust.

Coming soon...

Day 1 wrap-up

Breakfast

Day 2 kick-off

Reallocating focus - how to pause, accelerate, and subtract product initiatives when market conditions shift

Details coming soon...

From Basement Startup to a $1.2B Evaluation: The Business Value of Design

As designers, we all want a seat at the table. So what do you do when you don't have one? How do you convince C-level leadership to invest in user research and build a design system? How do you lead with a product vision and strategy when others view your role as making interfaces look pretty?

Skip the presentations on how design has impacted other companies and instead do something specific and personal for your own. Start by focusing on what your leaders are already convinced of. Don't just show the numbers, but also create an emotional impact. Expose the current experience, then help visualize and share what the future experience could be. Create a compelling strategy that connects the dots of how you'll get from where you are to where you need to be. Then execute relentlessly, and witness the transformation.

This is the story of how the design team at SimpleNexus demonstrated the business value of design to help a basement startup grow and reach a $1.2 billion evaluation.

Break (drinks and snacks)

Designing in Crisis

In a place far from home, how do refugees and asylum seekers find information about and understand how to navigate a complex government process of applying for asylum? In this presentation, I’ll share how our team conducted human-centered design research with asylum seekers for the US asylum program, how those insights illuminated areas of improvement for content strategy and service design, and how we redesigned content and services while balancing needs for ease of use and data security.

Finally, I'll show how design strategy work illuminated the need for overhauling our overall organization's strategy. You'll leave this session with insight into the opportunity and impact of thoughtful product strategy in government, examples from specific case studies featuring the work of the United States Digital Service in designing products and services for asylum seekers, and lessons learned from conducting design research with vulnerable communities.

How to build a feedback system to test 4-8 ideas a week

Impactful work multiplies the efforts of those around you. Having scalable patterns to test ideas, weed out the good from the bad, is instrumental for preemptively finding the next opportunities for your team and adopting product-led growth. Learn how Lucid built a feedback system to test 4-8 ideas a week.

Lunch

The Utah Flag Machine: How Trolling Utahs New Flag Initiative Created Overwhelming Participation and Influenced the Design of Utahs New Flag.

When the state of Utah announced their initiative to redesign the state flag, Rob Foster and I started scheming about how we could get involved in the process. Over a couple weekends, we put together a website that would generate random Utah-themed flags and allow people to customize the designs to their liking. The site was meant to be fun, playful and even a little bit sarcastic—poking a little fun at Utah and the seriousness of flag design (vexillology).

Over the period of just a few months the The Flag Machine received local, national, and industry attention and received over 50,000 visitors from all over the world who helped Utah receive record numbers of official flag submissions.

The Flag Machine was a weekend hobby design project—but it inspired and unlocked several ideas about design, community participation, and software interactions that all contributed to its success.

In this presentation to the Front audiences, we'd like to share our story and some unique ideas about software and design that we learned along the way, including:

• The value of creative outlets outside of your day job
• The power of randomness and constraint
• Using the computer as a tool to help generate thousands, even millions of design options (vs. three variations)
• Building interfaces that are fun for anyone to use, including disabled or people with low motor function
• The strange world of vexillology (design of flags)
• The excitement of building tools that empower people to be creative.
• Community engagement and lay person design vs. design snobbism

Hot Chicken Therapy: How to run remote "field research"

It's becoming common to expect PMs and PDs to run some user research. But what if you're stuck in a global pandemic? How can you get into the field without leaving your house...

Varun puts the call out for more folks to run in the field research remotely. He'll walk through how he launched research at Best Buy that transformed how the company thought about really getting into the minds of their users without leaving their homes. Hint: the key is Nashville hot chicken.

Break (drinks and snacks)

Building the Right Thing - Even When You are Told No

All Product Owners have been given competing directives regarding the direction we want to take our product. Often the immediate needs outweigh the long term strategic growth of our products. Over time this can lead to full-time support of a legacy system no one wants to maintain leaving little to no time available for refactoring let alone new development. Is there a solution to this problem?

This is the exact situation I faced when I was hired at USANA. My development team was stuck, monitoring a legacy system while wanting to build a better system using the latest and greatest technologies. This presented a bigger problem however as my team is responsible for the commission payments to all of USANA’s associates around the world requiring constant update to respond to executive requests and international laws. In sum, more obstacles were presented making the problem grow more ominous and seemingly impossible to overcome.

I derived a creative solution that would check all the boxes while providing my team the time and resources to press ahead making our product the flagship it is today.

Take a deep breath—lets talk about the power of design intention

"Focus on the people, empower the community, the bring intention and context into all that we do". This past year placed a magnifying glass on what matters most to each of us. Family, careers, joy, and life fulfillment. Whether you're a seasoned pro, or just getting into product and design you'll learn fast that without strong peer building networks, community, and support the pursuit of life fulfillment can feel like a lonesome path. However, it's 2022 and we live in an age of a technology boom, so many tools, so many opportunities, with limitless potential.

In this talk, Drew will reflect on the evolution of GrowthDay, a 2021 Startup that was founded to help bring personal development to the world through the use of tools, community, and life coaching. Built and founded during COVID, GrowthDay is a cross-platform personal development app. Led by world-renown 3-time New York Times bestselling author and High-performance coach, and CEO Brendon Burchard. GrowthDay had 20 years of research and has been serving the community without an app. You'll see what's possible in 1 year with great intention, responsibility, and empowerment.

Drew will also uncover the power of how rituals and routines played into the early success of this platform. Drew will also discuss how he leveraged his training and development platform Next Level UX to develop frameworks around the most important areas of focus when building new companies, teams, and relationships while manifesting a rich learning and high-performance culture.

Closing remarks