Opening Keynote: Org Design for Design Orgs
As the move to establish in-house design teams accelerates, it turns out there’s very little common wisdom on what makes for a successful design organization. Books and presentations tend to focus on process, methods, and tools, leaving a gap of knowledge when it comes to organizational and operational matters. Kristin Skinner, Head of Design Management at Capital One and co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams, will shine a light on the unsung activities of actually running a design team, the operational challenges and considerations, and what works and what doesn’t. Drawing on her experience managing design teams and organizations at Microsoft’s Pioneer Studios, Adaptive Path, and Capital One, Kristin will discuss how what happens “behind the scenes” and how a focus on design management and operations can ultimately affect a design organization’s output, quality, and effectiveness.
Enterprise UX Playbook (Videoconference)
Many of the most successful software development practices — like agile and UX — emerged in the consumer facing private sector. Think Airbnb, Spotify, Uber. But what happens when we try to map those practices onto large enterprises that typically serve internal employees rather than the public? For example, are UX’ers prepared to think about how large systems connect and interact? How about the challenges of HR and roles and responsibilities? Challenges such as these are highly relevant in enterprise spaces, and perhaps even more so in the public sector where systems are often quite old and ways of working have calcified. This talk focuses on “gaps” in Enterprise UX, and how we might seek to close them.
AccessibilityOps: Moving beyond “nice to have”
Accessibility Operations is real, and it’s enabling organizations to make their products and services more inclusive at scale. Join our panel discussion, featuring AccessibilityOps insights from the session’s sponsor, Fable, as well as experts in accessibility and inclusive design from Microsoft and Hilton. We’ll explore how companies are integrating accessibility into their core processes, as well as practical strategies to move beyond compliance and create inclusive experiences for both employees and customers. Bring your questions and discover how to make accessibility a fundamental part of your business strategy!
Unleashing Swarm Creativity to Solve Enterprise Challenges with Surya Vanka
Surya Vanka, speaker at the upcoming Design at Scale conference, joins Lou to discuss “Design Swarms,” which he’ll also cover during his conference presentation. Surya shares his experiences working to solve major social problems like gender discrimination and the opioid crisis through design thinking exercises. He also discusses ways leaders can step back to create more value from the “swarm.”
Surya recommends:
Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change by Victor Papanek
Enterprises, even those with mature design practices, find it difficult to tap into the creativity of all of its workforce. Yet unleashing that broad creativity is now needed more than ever as success of teams depends on having the nimbleness of an ant farm to adapt and find their way around obstacles. Enterprise design processes, systems and ops are often tied to old top-down command/control organizational models. Design Swarms is an approach that has been used and adopted by teams within companies like Amazon, Amgen, Autodesk, Callison, Deutsche Bank, Lilly, T-Mobile, Microsoft, and REI to unleash swarm creativity at scale.
How Your Organization’s Generative Workshops Are Probably Going Wrong and How to Get Them Right
Generative workshops are a critical generative component of any product development process. But in my 20+ years conducting product user research, I have seen more product harm come from so-called “workshops” or “design sprints” than good. In this tutorial, I will share more about my experience and what I’ve found are critical components of generative workshops — whether they last five hours or five days.
Contrary to popular belief, a design sprint is a highly structured and carefully designed series of exercises, not a brainstorm, design jam or free-for-all. The whole point is to drive a cross-functional team to the right outcome, and this requires a set of structured exercises which weave the thread of user needs, behaviors and attitudes throughout. This involves more than reviewing the research at the start and then moving on to create without that research in context.
A true design sprint takes us from user insights — even broad user insights — to user-evaluated concepts or designs. The generative phase of a product is deeply impactful, and design sprints are a fantastic tool for driving this needed impact. However, many are practicing brainstorms or design jams rather than true design sprints. One can make a mismatched concept extremely usable throughout the product development process, but that will not remedy the fact that it is not the right concept.
Researchers are ideal design sprint organizers and facilitators, but researchers are sometimes not even considered a critical component of the sprint. It’s important for knowledgeable researchers to drive design sprint impact.
Theme 3: Through the Looking Glass – The Outsider’s Perspective on the Enterprise
When in-house resources can’t keep up with demand, we often turn to external help. Sometimes, such relationships are love stories that produce beautiful and successful experience babies. But sometimes they lead to tension.
In Theme 3, we will hear from leaders at Salesforce and Mastercard who have both in-house and agency experience under their belt, as well as consultants from three different countries who know enterprises like the back of their hands. They will discuss what enterprises can learn from agencies and vice versa, and teach specific tactics they have developed to get the most out of outsider/insider relationship.
Enterprise UX and Storytelling: A Chat with Dan Willis
Everyone has a story to tell, and UX practitioners are no exception. Lou talked with seasoned UX consultant Dan Willis about his role as the Storytelling Curator at the Enterprise UX Conference. Dan discusses the process that speakers go through to join the pantheon of past Enterprise UX Conference Storytellers – and how you can be part of this amazing tradition.
Design in Product — Conference Curator Christian Crumlish
Lou sits down with Christian Crumlish, a product and UX leadership consultant at Design in Product, where he also hosts a product/UX community. Together they discuss the challenges that Design and Product traditionally have faced. They explore the intersection of these two functions and the need for a long overdue conversation: how Design and Product can be better partners. Christian is named as the curator of the newly announced Design in Product conference, hosted by Rosenfeld Media on December 6, 2022. They go on to discuss how this event will help designers and researchers better understand the challenges that product people face in order to improve their working relationship.
The Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX (Videoconference)
Directors of UX are navigating an overwhelming set of explicit and implicit expectations in their work, leading to frustration, anxiety, burnout, and leaving the field altogether. In this freewheeling discussion with guest Peter Merholz, organizational consultant and leadership mentor, we’ll address how we got into this situation (layoffs requiring those who remain to manage more people; botched agile transformations requiring UXers to lean into product management; immature organizations not knowing how to value the work), and identify paths forward out of this mess.
DesignOps as Service: Talking Adaptive Mapping with Michael Polivka
To most designers, DesignOps sounds like a necessary evil. But not to Michael Polivka, Chief of Staff for Experience Design at Autodesk. Michael talks with Lou about how DesignOps actually serves product teams. And how adaptive modeling and radical prioritization from the top down can make design scalable in an enterprise environment.
