Talk + Schedule

12:00 am
April 26, 2023

April 26, 2023

12:00 am
April 26, 2023
Coming Soon!
5:00 pm
Early registration

Early registration

5:00 pm
Early registration
Coming Soon!
7:00 pm
Opening reception (light refreshments)

Opening reception (light refreshments)

7:00 pm
Opening reception (light refreshments)
Coming Soon!
12:00 am
April 27, 2023

April 27, 2023

12:00 am
April 27, 2023
Coming Soon!
7:30 am
Registration and breakfast

Registration and breakfast

7:30 am
Registration and breakfast
Coming Soon!
9:00 am
Opening remarks

Opening remarks

9:00 am
Opening remarks
Coming Soon!
9:10 am
Designing & Delivering Products at the Speed of Change

Designing & Delivering Products at the Speed of Change

9:10 am
Designing & Delivering Products at the Speed of Change
Shawn Johnson
Former GVP Product & Design
Formerly Discovery+ | NBCU | Microsoft

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.

9:45 am
Subscribe to a better version of yourself: Why customers pay for aspirational products

Subscribe to a better version of yourself: Why customers pay for aspirational products

9:45 am
Subscribe to a better version of yourself: Why customers pay for aspirational products
Lauren Treasure
Chief Product Officer
Chatbooks

In product development, we focus a lot on solving customer problems. In my experience, the most successful products are helping customers achieve their aspirations, not merely solving their problems. I will talk through examples of customer aspirations and how to identify them, including how my team at Chatbooks created an incredibly successful subscription product that allowed customers to feel like better parents just by subscribing.

10:20 am
Break (drinks and snacks)

Break (drinks and snacks)

10:20 am
Break (drinks and snacks)
Coming Soon!
11:00 am
Herding Cats: The Untold Skills Required for Design Innovation

Herding Cats: The Untold Skills Required for Design Innovation

11:00 am
Herding Cats: The Untold Skills Required for Design Innovation
Steve Gustavson
VP, Design Innovation
Service Now

You've been given a mission to plant a flag and create and sell a vision for the future of an important product experience. The only catch: There's no brief. And the teams who need to buy-in don't know why you're doing it. And importantly, why YOU are doing it, instead of them.

The reality is that great product innovation is not for the feint of heart. It requires intense organization and the ability to deliver an inspiring, realistically attainable future vision that aligns everyone around a shared outcome.

Steve will share a story about a product experience he's leading around the future of end-user experiences for ServiceNow. And the hard lessons he's learned along the way.

11:35 am
Color and contrast for accessible interfaces

Color and contrast for accessible interfaces

11:35 am
Color and contrast for accessible interfaces
Nate Baldwin
Principal Product Designer
Intuit

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.

12:10 pm
Lunch

Lunch

12:10 pm
Lunch
Coming Soon!
1:40 pm
Building products in an AI first world

Building products in an AI first world

1:40 pm
Building products in an AI first world
Nate Sanders
Chief Executive Officer
Artifact

Building AI products breaks the normal harmony, cadence, and discovery tracks for most companies. Learn how a few mental models and principles has helped the Artifact team solve difficult problems for an AI first product.

2:15 pm
Responsible Innovation During Crisis

Responsible Innovation During Crisis

2:15 pm
Responsible Innovation During Crisis
Nancy Douyon
Design Ethicist
Douyon Signature
Prev Uber & Google

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

2:50 pm
Break (drinks and snacks)

Break (drinks and snacks)

2:50 pm
Break (drinks and snacks)
Coming Soon!
3:30 pm
Fixing product analytics: lessons from a frustrated Microsoft PM

Fixing product analytics: lessons from a frustrated Microsoft PM

3:30 pm
Fixing product analytics: lessons from a frustrated Microsoft PM
Shruti Goli
Chief Product Officer & Co-founder
Trymata

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.

4:05 pm
Enough with the Confetti: How to design delight by infusing your product with brand attributes rather than a sprinkle of magic pixie dust.

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

4:05 pm
Enough with the Confetti: How to design delight by infusing your product with brand attributes rather than a sprinkle of magic pixie dust.
Kyle Turman
Director of Product Design
Retool

Few words get passed around more often than “delight” when talking about how to build products that people love.

Yet the word delight often is misconstrued or poorly defined that teams end up using “delight” as a catch-all for anything that feels fun or exciting.

In this talk we’ll go over some examples of what it means to build delight into your product in a way that aligns with and boosts your company’s brand perception and also give you the tools to say “enough with the confetti already!” and come up with a better version of delight for you, your team, and your customers.

4:40 pm
Day 1 wrap-up

Day 1 wrap-up

4:40 pm
Day 1 wrap-up
Coming Soon!
12:00 am
April 28, 2023

April 28, 2023

12:00 am
April 28, 2023
Coming Soon!
7:30 am
Breakfast

Breakfast

7:30 am
Breakfast
Coming Soon!
9:00 am
Day 2 kick-off

Day 2 kick-off

9:00 am
Day 2 kick-off
Coming Soon!
9:10 am
Innovation vs Execution: How to turn a product vision into reality

Innovation vs Execution: How to turn a product vision into reality

9:10 am
Innovation vs Execution: How to turn a product vision into reality
Bentley Wilson
CEO & Head of Product
Cardagraph

Product teams today are great at innovating, but after you validate a new feature for your user base how do you reliably take that same, envisioned, value through your engineering pipeline all the way to delivery for your end users? More often than not, what is delivered to your users is not consistent with the value you originally validated with them - often leading to a lack luster response and seldom actually delivering the value you initially set out to provide.

How to execute on a product vision is one of the most important and impactful skills you can learn as a product leader.

Join me as I delve into my journey with product delivery and learning to work with engineers to deliver on the vision and value that customers expect.

9:45 am
From Basement Startup to a $1.2B Evaluation: The Business Value of Design

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

9:45 am
From Basement Startup to a $1.2B Evaluation: The Business Value of Design
Mitch Clements
UX Manager
SimpleNexus

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.

10:20 am
Break (drinks and snacks)

Break (drinks and snacks)

10:20 am
Break (drinks and snacks)
Coming Soon!
11:00 am
Designing in Crisis

Designing in Crisis

11:00 am
Designing in Crisis
Crystal Yan
Product Manager
Stripe

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.

11:35 am
How to build a feedback system to test 10 ideas a week

How to build a feedback system to test 10 ideas a week

11:35 am
How to build a feedback system to test 10 ideas a week
Preston Hunter
Product Manager
Lucid

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 10 ideas a week.

11:35 am
How to build a feedback system to test 10 ideas a week

How to build a feedback system to test 10 ideas a week

11:35 am
How to build a feedback system to test 10 ideas a week
Elizabeth Beeli
Associate Product Manager
Lucid

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 10 ideas a week.

12:10 pm
Lunch

Lunch

12:10 pm
Lunch
Coming Soon!
1:40 pm
The Utah Flag Machine: How Trolling Utah's New Flag Initiative Created Overwhelming Participation and Influenced the Design of Utah's New Flag

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

1:40 pm
The Utah Flag Machine: How Trolling Utah's New Flag Initiative Created Overwhelming Participation and Influenced the Design of Utah's New Flag
John Dilworth
VP of UX Lucid | Co-Founder The Flag Machine
The Flag Machine

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
1:40 pm
The Utah Flag Machine: How Trolling Utah's New Flag Initiative Created Overwhelming Participation and Influenced the Design of Utah's New Flag

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

1:40 pm
The Utah Flag Machine: How Trolling Utah's New Flag Initiative Created Overwhelming Participation and Influenced the Design of Utah's New Flag
Rob Foster
UX Director Kuali | Co-Founder The Flag Machine

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

2:15 pm
How to show off YOU!

How to show off YOU!

2:15 pm
How to show off YOU!
Ethan Medeiros
Tech Recruiting Manager
Vendr

This talk is going to take you into a look at what Talent Acquisition looks for in a candidate. What are the in's and out's to make yourself more desirable to a company. This is what will make you shine when looking for a new opportunity.

2:50 pm
Break (drinks and snacks)

Break (drinks and snacks)

2:50 pm
Break (drinks and snacks)
Coming Soon!
3:30 pm
Building the Right Thing - Even When You are Told No

Building the Right Thing - Even When You are Told No

3:30 pm
Building the Right Thing - Even When You are Told No
Brian Christensen
Group Product Manager
USANA

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. "

4:05 pm
Take a deep breath....lets talk about The Power of Design Intention

Take a deep breath....lets talk about The Power of Design Intention

4:05 pm
Take a deep breath....lets talk about The Power of Design Intention
Drew Bridewell
Head of Product and Design
GrowthDay
GrowthDay

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 2023 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.

4:40 pm
Closing remarks

Closing remarks

4:40 pm
Closing remarks
Coming Soon!

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