Algorithms are all the rage right now and are showing us ways of creating products that are more empathetic, useful, and engaging. Learning how to take advantage of this new superpower to solve your next big idea can exciting but where do you start? What makes a good fit for data science and what do you do as a designer or product manager to get it going? We will be recounting our experience with leveraging data science and machine learning in our products and share tips on how to do it well.
About Chris
Chris Mayfield is a VP of Product at Pluralsight, user experience practitioner and design leader. Over the last 15 years he has worked for corporations, non-profits and start-up environments. In each case there has had a passion for solving problems using the principles of user centered design. He leads cross functional teams including designers, product managers and engineers. He has made using technology to help change behavior for good a focus and passion.
Previously before working at Pluralsight Chris helped create Welbe, a disruptive technology that helps connect organizations with employees favorite wearable fitness devices. Welbe is the first ever corporate wellness platform that uses realtime wellness intelligence enabling employers to influence real behavior change. Chris resides in Syracuse, Utah with his wife Michelle and his four daughters. His passions are fitness, nutrition hacks, photography and travel.
About Bhavika
Bhavika is a product manager at Pluralsight where she works on the Pluralsight IQ product. She loves building products that help people learn technology more effectively and using data to build a personalized learning experience. Leveraging her experiences as both a product analyst and user researcher, she enjoys blending quantitative and qualitative methods to inform product decisions.
Prior to her product roles at Pluralsight, Bhavika held client-facing roles at Smarterer (acquired by Pluralsight) and General Electric, after completing the GE Commercial Leadership Program. Bhavika holds a Bachelors of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Algorithms are all the rage right now and are showing us ways of creating products that are more empathetic, useful, and engaging. Learning how to take advantage of this new superpower to solve your next big idea can exciting but where do you start? What makes a good fit for data science and what do you do as a designer or product manager to get it going? We will be recounting our experience with leveraging data science and machine learning in our products and share tips on how to do it well.
About Chris
Chris Mayfield is a VP of Product at Pluralsight, user experience practitioner and design leader. Over the last 15 years he has worked for corporations, non-profits and start-up environments. In each case there has had a passion for solving problems using the principles of user centered design. He leads cross functional teams including designers, product managers and engineers. He has made using technology to help change behavior for good a focus and passion.
Previously before working at Pluralsight Chris helped create Welbe, a disruptive technology that helps connect organizations with employees favorite wearable fitness devices. Welbe is the first ever corporate wellness platform that uses realtime wellness intelligence enabling employers to influence real behavior change. Chris resides in Syracuse, Utah with his wife Michelle and his four daughters. His passions are fitness, nutrition hacks, photography and travel.
About Bhavika
Bhavika is a product manager at Pluralsight where she works on the Pluralsight IQ product. She loves building products that help people learn technology more effectively and using data to build a personalized learning experience. Leveraging her experiences as both a product analyst and user researcher, she enjoys blending quantitative and qualitative methods to inform product decisions.
Prior to her product roles at Pluralsight, Bhavika held client-facing roles at Smarterer (acquired by Pluralsight) and General Electric, after completing the GE Commercial Leadership Program. Bhavika holds a Bachelors of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Product teams often view a customer’s interaction with their offering as limited within a set of product features. But to a customer, it really extends to the end-to-end experience with your entire brand — from acquisition ads, targeted emails and sponsored content, to the website, the software or physical product experience, and continued via support interactions. Consider how much better the customer journey is with a consistent experience across every interaction. But how do you make it consistent when all you can control is the UX in your product area? This presentation will provide a framework on how to build and maintain strong relationships with your counterparts across the organization, as well as real examples from my experience at Chatbooks and Ancestry.
As teams and products grow it can become complicated to maintain consistency across all properties, additionally, there is often a duplication of initial work for each product starting from scratch. By establishing and maintaining a company-wide design language and design system implementation, teams are better equipped to ensure consistency, reduce duplication of work, and improve overall design and code quality.
Every organization defines product management differently. In this presentation, you’ll hear from the VP of product and strategy at Divvy on how they’ve taken a very different approach to product, and why it’s so important to truly align product with revenue.
About TylerAs VP of Product and Strategy at Divvy, Tyler Hogge leads a growing team of world-class PMs, Designers, and Product Marketers on Divvy’s mission of becoming the financial nervous system of every business.
Before joining Divvy, Tyler was a product leader at Wealthfront, where he built the world’s first holistic, free financial planning application, earning the highest rating in the financial category of the app store. Tyler also spent time at SaaStr and at Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley based VC fund.
Tyler studied finance at Southern Utah University where he was a captain of the D1 baseball team. He earned his M.B.A. from Cornell University and is also a CFA Charterholder.
When he’s not working, Tyler enjoys fly fishing, watching NBA basketball, and spending time with his wife and three kids in the mountains of Alpine, Utah.
You've done extensive user research, you've investigated competing alternatives, you've crunched the numbers. After completing significant discovery work, you've become very invested in the problem and are excited about possible solutions … But you realize the right decision for the business is to pivot. In this presentation, I'll discuss my experience moving away from a favorite project and what I learned from the process - how to fail faster without the feeling of failure.
Laura Luttmer is a Product Manager at Lucid Software on the Visual Platform teams. There, she is focused on building an easy-to-use, extensible platform that helps customers and partners customize their Lucidchart experience and visualize their data in context.
Before she began her career in Product, Laura was a mathematics graduate researcher, marketing analyst, and high school math teacher. When she’s not thinking about the future of data and diagram automation at Lucid, she can be found baking delicious yet ugly things, abandoning half-finished craft projects, and hiking with her dog
Let’s explore what it’s like to take the product idea you have from your kitchen table to the marketplace. We’ll study the journey of Everee and how I quickly learned that we weren’t just building a product but a business. We’ll explore how we assessed our idea, built our team, determined our funding strategy, assessed product market fit, measured our success, monetized our product investments and did all of this while maintaining our day job. In the end, you'll leave with a blueprint of how you can act on your own idea.
Kyle has been building B2B SaaS since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. His journey has taken him across many different industries and in all stages of growth. He is now the CPO and Co-Founder of Everee.
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.
In this workshop Drew will help you build your own High-Performance Product and Design Playbook through the following...
What features should we build? How should we implement them? When are they ready to ship?Decision making is central to the job of every product leader. To be great product leaders, we all want to be right in every decision we make. But this isn’t possible.We face too much uncertainty in our profession. Being wrong is inevitable. Furthermore, trying to be right all the time can lead us to defend our position and pre-existing beliefs.Instead, we should try to be wrong less often.This workshop will cover uncommon mental models (heuristics, frameworks, techniques, and thinking strategies) that product leaders can use to be less wrong. For each model, we’ll introduce the concept and then follow-up with case studies and exercises to practice using it to make decisions in your daily work.
You have a product vision and a solid strategy for getting there, but how do you know it's the right strategy? How do you remove as much risk as possible, and make the right product investment(s)? How do you increase your odds of winning? You make calculated bets. In this workshop, I'll share what I've seen work to win.
Balancing investments between new market opportunities and innovation for existing customers can be one of the most challenging questions a business has to answer. It’s asking the age-old question, “should we go wider or should we go deeper?” Going wider increases the TAM of your product but it comes with great risk because it’s not a question of just product/market fit but of company/market fit. Going deeper satisfies your current clients but will it expand your revenue?
The purpose of this workshop is to develop a methodology to answer this question. We will create a scorecard to help you and your team identify opportunities and risks in order to decide which investments are right for your company.
Finally get your team to see how easy it can be do to research so you can understand your users. In this workshop we'll practice user interviews and usability testing. You'll have a toolkit for doing research on your own.
Many teams talk about doing research, but not enough teams actually do research. One main reason for this is lack of buy in from stakeholders and executives. Another reason is because research is perceived as being expense and time consuming. In this workshop, we’ll walk through the entire research process and understand how to get buy in and how to conduct smart, effective user research.
The workshop will consist of a brief overview of why research matters so that you can have more informed discussions with team mates and colleagues who don’t buy into research. Then, we’ll take a deep dive into the research process as well as practice doing research on each other based on a mock project that you’ll learn about in the workshop.
The best time to get super-curious about all the unknown unknowns is early on in a project. But all too often, we end up brushing complex business rules and information architecture aside in the name of “low fidelity.” Unfortunately, as we avoid asking hard questions to our users, stakeholders, and developers — while designing features and screens without full context — we end up with piles of rework. In this workshop, you’ll learn about the four tough questions you should be asking early on—to make the rest of the project easier and more successful.
And then, you’ll learn how to answer these four questions through collaborative, structured, and super-effective exercises.You’ll come out of the workshop with four new facilitation and design frameworks that will help you and your team tackle complex problems with confidence:
Together, these methods will give you X-ray vision into the complexity at hand, while also generating a laundry list of questions for further research.
So you need a product vision... now what? This workshop is all about creating product vision and strategy from the ground up. We'll talk about the different components of an effective product vision and strategy, and how to create them. You'll leave the workshop with a gameplan to create these things for your team in 2 weeks or less.
Whether you're a senior-level individual contributor or people manager, ensuring your teams run well is critical to get results. This workshop will be an overview on the primary responsibilities of being a coach, operator, and strategist in design leadership.
We'll cover:As companies scale, what got you here won't get you there. In this workshop, we'll cover:
You'll come out of this workshop with a best practices and an operating playbook to run and grow your design orgs.
The demand for product leaders who understand AI and how to leverage it to drive an impactful business strategy is skyrocketing. In this workshop, you will learn how to evaluate AI opportunities, how to infuse AI into your roadmap, how to launch AI products, and how to maximize the impact of your AI initiatives with the minimal amount of resources. This interactive workshop will include case studies from real-world AI product roles and set you on your path to become an expert AI & data product leader.
By focusing so much on what comes at the end of research: the solution, we get in the way of understanding the problems we are trying to solve.
This class teaches more about developing a mindset of exploration and discovery before getting to solutions. Whether you’re a PM, a Designer, or a Researcher, this class will help you understand how to plan, synthesize, and share research that looks to understand user’s obstacles and leverage those insights to inspire creativity and empathy among your teams.
Storytelling makes products, makes teams, and makes companies. Telling your story is telling your users why they should care, your team why they should invest their best selves into their work, and yourself where all this effort is taking you. I will be recounting my experience with leveraging stories to convince investors, peers, colleagues, and myself of what matters, and sharing tips on how to do it well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Reserve your seat now for the premier UX and Product Management training experience. Design your custom training program now. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned professional, the Front UX & Product Management Workshops Series will take you and your team to the next level in product design and management.