You’re an experienced product practitioner who has a love of mentoring and an ambition for leadership but are not sure where to start. To make that shift you need to arm yourself with some tactical skills around building a team, developing a team, and even having the hard conversations needed to keep the team healthy. In this workshop, we will be breaking our time into focusing on these three areas, reviewing tactics and tools, and learning through doing.
Experience Team Building 101: How to recruit, interview and identify the best person for your team. We will look at strategies for finding amazing applicants, effective ways of interviewing, and things to looks for and consider in selecting a new team member.Developing Your Team: Tools to develop your PMs and UX Designers, and create career paths within your organization We will look at defining what career paths exist / should exist in your company, learn to use tools that help us guide a conversation to understand the many dimensions of your team member, and practice ways to select and prioritize actionable things you can work with your team member to improve.
Conversations: How to manage Product Managers and UX Designers who are dropping the ball. We will talk about one of the hardest and most important parts of leadership, managing team members who are dropping the ball. This is easier said than done. First, we need to understand why the ball is being dropped (system, workload, communication, soft skills, disengagement). If it is a system or workload issue, how do we co-author a solution with the team? If it is a communication or soft skills issue, how do we coach the individual? And if it is a disengagement issue, how do we have the hard conversation with our team member that they must step up or move on.
Mariah Hay is the Chief Experience Officer at Help Scout, a customer support platform for small and medium businesses. In her role, Mariah leads all of R&D (including engineering, product management, and product design) across eleven domestic and international teams, delivering a product that boasts a 20%+ trial conversion rate within a B Corp business model. Under her previous leadership roles as the Vice President of Product and Head of Practices at Pluralsight, they successfully launched its technology learning platform in June 2016 and by mid 2017 it was serving more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies. In the following years Mariah has led the product team through a successful 2018 IPO, and complete learning platform integration with Code School (a Pluralsight Company), bringing learn-by-doing experiences to Pluralsight learners globally.
Mariah has spent her career teaching and advocating for human-centered design. In 2017 she was awarded the Excellence in Product award by the Women Tech Council for her outstanding product leadership and success in promoting practices coupled with organizational and philosophy design for measurable business impact. Before joining Pluralsight, Mariah served as the Director of User Experience for Universal Mind, one of the largest independent digital agencies in North America, where she built their Dallas office. She also led user experience for AMC Health, and under her leadership, the company developed a remote patient monitoring software that connects with medical devices and clinical services. Prior to that, Mariah served as a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design where she developed and directed graduate coursework focused on interdisciplinary collaboration and the integration of tangible design thinking on all levels of strategy, planning and management.
Mariah earned a Bachelor's in Studio Art at the College of Charleston and a Master's of Fine Art in Industrial Design from Savannah College of Art and Design. In the past she has served on the board of the Women’s Tech Council of Utah, founded the Salt Lake City Chapter of Ladies that UX, and served as Co-Organizer for Product Hive, a community of product managers, strategists and designers that come together to learn, contribute and connect, through volunteer-led opportunities. She continues to share her knowledge and passion for advancing human-centered design through the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School.
In it's 8th 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.
