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.
Like most aspects of product and development, research looks very different at a startup compared to an enterprise business. Comparisons can be made of research practices at different sized companies, but how does the transition actually happen? How do you know when it is time to move from one research approach to another? This presentation will address how to tell which research stage best fits your business, and what you need to do to level-up your research when the time is right. The story of Jane can help you anticipate how a team navigates these large-scale process changes to become a research powerhouse on the other side.
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.
You’ve done it! Your company has organized product into autonomous, empowered teams staffed with a PM, UX, and Engineering. You’ve fully adopted human-centered research and design practices, and are continuously delivering releases to production. So how come your beautiful, theme-based product roadmap is moving so slowly? Why does it still seem to take so long to get from understanding the customer’s pain point to actually solving that pain point in the product?
In this talk, Joseph will help answer why most of our product work is actually bigger, slower, and less outcome-based than we realize. He’ll draw from his experience leading product in a B2B2C environment with billion-dollars clients and hundreds of thousands of end customers, as he shares the simple, but powerful practice that can help your product team start consistently delivering customer value within days, rather than weeks or months.
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.
Integrating a thriving research practice into fast-moving engineering cadences can be tricky. There's no need to do this alone. I'll be sharing how I've partnered in the past with departments across various companies to bolster and support my UX research efforts.
Product vision can be a strong force in product design – it drives teams to work towards a shared outcome and provides self-evident answers to “What are we building? And Why?” Teams that are not driven by purpose and intent are rudderless, habitually choosing precedent over innovation, merely copying what already exists in the hopes it will work here too.
As a result product vision is often difficult to pin down or name. It’s “something we all share” or “in the deck”. If you open that deck you will find a roadmap with features like “Next Generation Search” or “Shopping 2.0”. This approach leads to unclear and under-used, general meh products. It also leads to team dysfunction, trust issues and ultimately—burnout.
So how do you collaboratively create product vision? One that provides enough clarity for an organization to plan, design and build a product a year out, but one that also affords the team responsive and agile shifts as they learn in the market. David Merkoski, former ECD of frog design and startup design advisor will share with Front a new design tool—a Reference Design—that tames the complexity of product vision for startups.
Not a design system, nor a set of rules and principles—a Reference Design captures a specific visual rendering of the shared intent and outcomes for a future product in detailed material form. Used in other industries, "Reference Designs are technical blueprints of the system, they contain essential elements of the system, but are meant to be enhanced or modified as required."
Through a set of clear artifacts and a focus on language, a Reference Design forges internal agreement of the shared purpose that drives teams forward. A highly visible document, it is always the answer to "What are you/we doing?" While it may live in a Sketch file on the cloud, it is also literally hanging on the wall. Everyone should be able point to it... "That is what we are building." It is the reference.
Through a series of case studies spanning industries, startup stages and business models, David will explain how using the cyclical process of a Reference Design can open teams up to being their most engaged and invested selves at work. In fact, it becomes quite fun when design is no longer the block and everyone is practically anticipating the next feature to build, seeing the pieces come together. Because when you are design-driven, product-led – work just makes sense.
It may seem like the only way to take the next step in your UX Career is to begin managing design teams. But is that for you? How do you make the decision between Individual Contributor and Manager? What are the responsibility differences between the two tracks and how can you learn where your natural strengths align? In this presentation, Dillon will provide insights in the experiences he and others have had on this journey, and provide you with an action plan to help you move forward in your own career.
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.
The future of software products is private, personalized, and on-demand. In this talk, Gabe will cover the lessons learned from the launch of private personalization startup Canopy's first consumer app, Tonic and how they can be applied to making future-proof decisions when designing products in 2021 and beyond.
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.
The nature of culture is organically formed by the attitudes of the community; conversely, community is grounded in its culture. Community and culture are naturally occurring in any work environment, and can symbiotically survive without intervention. Given their influence on the health of our team, why not give it an assist? In this talk, Margaret will reflect on the evolution of Google UX since 2007, a period marked by tectonic shifts in technology, a rise in consumer expectations, and the individuation of UX as a discipline. As the UX Director for Google Maps for nine years, she experienced firsthand the throes of constant change and rapid scale, and saw the same for her peers across the company. In 2016, Margaret seeded UX Community & Culture, a program that tackles the challenges and explores the opportunities that tend to fall between the organizational cracks. She’ll share the practical insights that can help you steer a team or organization of any size toward a healthy and thriving team culture.
How should you be thinking about improving retention? How Duolingo used growth models from gaming companies to ignite user growth.
One of the most difficult things about language learning is staying motivated. This is why Duolingo cares deeply about retention rates as the primary lever to fuel DAU growth. After years of efforts improving retention rates and not seeing much of it transfer over to increasing DAUs I lead the creation of a team to own all the metagame mechanics and improve retention with a different approach.
When thinking about increasing retention, many companies make mistakes by focusing on the wrong thing: improving onboarding.
I’ll address all the different levers you have to improve retention based on frameworks used by gaming companies (such as Zynga) and I’ll be giving specific examples on how we’ve put them to practice at Duolingo and the impact they had.
For years Pluralsight reaped the benefits of cross-functional teams but relied on a functional leadership org design. Come see what we learned in the last 451 days after moving to an org design where each leader is responsible for product, design, and engineering. While not a silver bullet, the new design has delivered on its promises. Teams no longer rely on multiple leaders—or experience the inevitable confusion that follows. They also enjoy less friction as they work together and collaborate more powerfully across teams. Whether you’re a leader, or a contributor, you’ll take home tactical lessons that will improve how you work with other disciplines.
Research can be scary. But the change in perspective that happens after you spend time connecting with customers is powerful, and the truths you learn are worth it. We're going to talk about how to bring more of that power to your work and maybe make it a little less scary. I like to call it the research mindset. It helps create new understanding about what’s possible, it provides insights to make a product better, and it helps guide and build momentum.
Join me as I talk about discovery work at Travelocity, Ancestry, Bluehost, and other organizations. You’ll learn how to conduct research that delivers results, changes behavior, and creates a research mindset within your organization.
When you are a true product and design leader, you challenge the status quo, the norm, and the populous opinion. This journey can be hard, lonely, and has its penalties: being criticized by detractors, questioned by popular opinions, and challenged in all different directions including your own organization. This talk will focus on the strategies on how to achieve true product and design leadership in your organization. Albert will share the difference between status quo and world-class product and design leadership, including the pitfalls of leadership and how to avoid them. The path to something outstanding is always uphill, but like anything great in this world, it will be worth the effort.
What do you do when no one cares about your product? How we turned Podium’s feedback tool from a failing beta to a successful launch
When I joined Podium, our Feedback tool was in a precarious state. As one sales VP explained, “The percentage of customers we could sell this to is in the single digits.” There were discussions of killing the product completely. Six months later, we launched it publicly to all customers, and it went on to sell millions in the following year. Here’s how we got there, and how you can too.
With most products, there can be many obstacles to product-market fit:
I’ll cover specific tactics we used to understand the problem in all three of these areas, including:
We’ll also discuss how we used that research to transform the product and its appeal… and the things we missed that created unexpected results.
We're often told as Product Teams to focus on creating the most minimally viable product we can while also prioritizing customer needs. We don't talk often enough about the times when our attempts at being scrappy have gotten in the way, and end up costing us more time, more re-work, and unnecessary pain for both customers and internal teams.
This case study will cover pitfalls that are easy to fall into when you're driven to learn quickly, the steps you can take up front to avoid those gotchas, as well as the key ways to ensure that you're intentional with your yeses, and relentless with your no's when prioritizing what you will and won't build for your customers.
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.
In this workshop Drew will help you build your own High-Performance Product and Design Playbook through the following...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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. "
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.
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.