Great products don’t exist in a vacuum—they live within a complex business system. To build impactful products, teams need to understand, influence, and help shape the broader context they operate in.
This talk will explore how to treat your company like a system: one that can be measured, tested, and optimized—just like a product. You’ll learn how aligning business architecture with product goals can remove friction, accelerate learning, and improve customer outcomes.
Key topics include:
If you’ve ever felt your product is limited by what’s happening “behind the scenes,” this talk will help you see how to unlock value by shaping the system around it.
AI isn’t just transforming the products we build—it’s transforming how we build companies. In this candid, fast-paced session, we’ll share how a product manager and a designer bootstrapped a startup using AI as our cofounder, copilot, and—at times—our therapist.
We’ll walk through how AI has helped us:
We haven’t (yet) built AI into our product—but we wouldn’t have gotten this far without it. This talk blends real-world examples with a practical playbook for indie builders and lean teams. You’ll walk away with time-saving tactics, fresh inspiration, and a clear view into what’s newly possible when AI meets hustle.
Trust isn’t just earned from users—it’s built internally, too. In this talk, Gladys Rosa-Mendoza, former researcher at Meta and founder of Visual Voice Design, walks through a real-world case study on how she crafted a visual storytelling strategy that aligned cross-functional teams, surfaced research insights, and built organizational confidence in the product vision.
Drawing from her experience with visual storytelling at Meta , Gladys will share how visual formats—like journey maps, data stories, and narrative frameworks—helped translate complex user research into emotionally resonant, decision-driving stories. You’ll learn how visuals don’t just enhance presentations—they reshape culture, speed up alignment, and make research stick.
Whether you’re a designer, researcher, or product lead, this session will offer practical tools for building trust across silos and elevating the influence of your work.
And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
Seriously though. Is an AI-assisted design pipeline that scales, that is compliant with your design system, which has built-in collaboration mechanisms, and which takes you all the way to frontend code possible in 2025? Technically it is. But this is beyond generative, zero-one work. There are some big challenges. And to realize them, you may not realize what you’ll have to give up.
And you’ll know exactly what I mean when the velocity you gained with idea generation is lost in refinement. When AI exacerbates design system drift. When you trade the collaboration and feedback mechanisms you had in Figma for the enslavement to an ever-current and always polished prototype process, with URLs passed around without any built-in feedback loop. When, instead of reused, organisms get lost in forked code-bases built for developer collaboration and not for design teams. When all you want is to be able to put it all back into Figma so you can refine it without screaming through an AI prompt for the twelfth time to move the thing five pixels to the left. When you’ve experienced all of these pains and more, only then will you be ready for this session.
At Rev, we’ve been finding solutions to some of the biggest challenges mature design teams face when they start designing with prompts. In this session Andrew will share what’s been working at Rev and what we’re looking forward to.
Managing team performance can be a challenge for both new and seasoned leaders. This session explores how AI can be a transformative tool for leadership, empowering you to navigate these challenges with clarity, accountability, and empathy.
We'll dive into practical applications, such as delivering feedback with kindness and specificity, setting clear expectations, and fostering a culture of accountability and growth. You’ll learn how to use AI not just for efficiency but to create better outcomes for your team by identifying patterns, refining language, and building actionable insights.
In this session, you'll be guided through step-by-step prompts and practical tools designed to:
Discover how AI can assist in creating a confident leadership style that promotes accountability and fosters personalized growth and development, empowering you to lead your team to success.
From starting as a bank teller to becoming Chief Product Officer at one of the world’s leading fintech platforms, Chris Gufford’s career is a masterclass in product leadership shaped by deep domain expertise. In this on-stage conversation, we’ll explore what it takes to lead product and engineering at scale in a highly regulated industry—where trust, precision, and innovation must move in lockstep.
Chris will share lessons from building and evolving nCino’s global product platform, how his teams are leveraging generative AI to augment complex workflows, and what it means to lead through transformation without losing sight of the human impact. This session offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at modern product leadership from someone who’s helped reinvent how banks operate from the inside out.
What happens when you realize that the smartest AI isn't necessarily the best teacher? At SchoolAI, we discovered that students don't need an AI that knows everything—they need one that knows how to guide them to their own discoveries. In this case study, I'll walk through our process of designing Dot, our AI teaching assistant that emotes, empathizes, and occasionally refuses to help (in the best possible way). From early prototypes that felt robotic to our current system that can detect when students need encouragement versus challenge—and even flag mental health concerns—this is the story of designing AI that feels genuinely human in service of genuinely human learning.
Not all AI is worth building. At Pattern, we use a simple framework to separate the projects that actually drive results from the ones that just make headlines. The GEO Scorecard (Generative Engine Optimization) is a prime example, transforming complex marketplace data into instant, actionable recommendations. This case study unpacks how we designed it, the lessons we learned along the way, and how you can apply the same decision-making lens to keep your AI projects focused and impactful.
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Banking software has long ignored post-origination activities despite them representing 80% of bankers’ daily work. This case study chronicles our 100-day journey from design sprint to deployed product, creating a Continuous Credit Monitoring solution- powered by timely Ai products-transforming tedious multi-source data gathering into streamlined credit review workflows.
This year, SeatGeek's Shop team was in need of a vision to work towards. After testing many ideas and not seeing the impactful results they were hoping for, the Shop team went back to the drawing board (and most importantly back to its users) to craft a true, research backed, full fledged vision that was going to inform their roadmap and get them real, impactful results. After 6 weeks of heads down collaboration between research, design, and product, the Shop team had a vision that not only inspired but that provided them with a strategy. As an added bonus, SeatGeek's product marketing team has turned it into a product release featured in the Sports Business Journal. This is the story of why research is a product team's best sidekick and how a shopping vision became a product team's big bet.
...And how AI prototyping helps you shut down noise and ship what matters—faster.
This talk shares how I’ve used strategic research—not just as validation, but as armor. At Typeform and beyond, I’ve avoided building distractions just to prove a point. I’ve protected design choices others called “wrong” by proving real customer impact. And by combining research with AI-supported prototyping tied into our design system, we’re accelerating collaboration—not skipping it. Engineers start from stronger ground. Designers defend their decisions. PMs move faster with fewer arguments.
For PMs: This is how you stop fighting for your roadmap and start proving it.
For designers: This is how you protect design integrity—even in version one.
For engineers: This is how you spend time on what matters most—because the prototype already knows what it’s trying to do.
Key Takeaways:
How strategic research stops distractions before they become deliverables
How AI prototyping + design system context accelerates collaboration (not replaces it)
How to turn earned intuition into defendable strategy
Why credibility, not consensus, is the product advantage nobody’s talking about
With a career spanning Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo, and now ThoughtSpot, Bob Baxley has helped shape the digital experiences millions use every day. In this intimate on-stage interview, we’ll explore Bob’s journey through decades of product and design evolution—from the early internet to today's AI-powered platforms.
Together, we’ll unpack what remains timeless about great design, what’s changing faster than ever, and how designers and product teams can stay relevant and resilient in the face of accelerating innovation. Bob brings honest insights, sharp perspective, and a deep understanding of what it really means to build meaningful, human-centered products in an AI-driven world.
In it's 10th year, Front is a sell-out event, with a 1,000 annual attendees from across the country and around the world. Join us at the Front to share, learn, and be inspired to create amazing products.