Design at Scale 2021

About #DAS2021

If you’re struggling to improve experiences in and for huge, bureaucratic enterprises weighed down by frustrating complexity, political dysfunction, and years of design debt, this conference is for you.

Design at Scale was a stage in the evolution of our flagship conference, which began as Enterprise UX in 2015, and became Enterprise Experience in 2019.

Our program is backed by a crack team of curators—Lada Gorlenko, Uday Gajendar, and Kit Unger—leaders who have helped to shape and define designing at scale for years

Program Themes

Theme 1: Ensuring Craft on a Massive Scale

Making, building, shaping, refining—it’s the fundamental aspects of design craft that matter. And they become even more critical when dealing with millions of users, hundreds of thousands of objects in a database, or dozens of geographies with their own peculiar needs. It takes a combination of skill and perspective to retain your focus while designing at scale. And to get there, it helps to hear first-hand accounts from the people who have lived it, and learn how they solved enterprise-class problems with human-scale craft.

Theme 2: The Tools for Success in Enterprise Design

Rapid growth is the singular goal for many businesses. It can also be a nightmare for design teams. Growing pains complicate every facet of a design practice: from projects, to teams, and up to the organization as whole. Fortunately, there are clear cut tips and processes for scaling, without compromising the quality of the work. The right design team, armed with a toolkit of these methods, can successfully navigate the minefields of growth and produce inspired enterprise design at any size.

Theme 3: Keeping People at the Center of an Expanding Enterprise

User Experience can only be as good as the people who drive it. And the world’s largest organizations are composed of individuals, each with their own skills and approach to design and research. Focusing on team culture is nice, but every employee has different needs and a different career trajectory. Simply put, the craft and process of enterprise design gets you nowhere without the right people working with the right values. To reliably and effectively scale at the enterprise level, you need to foster true communities of people with a shared vision and real purpose.

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