Breaking Barriers with Empathy
Empathy sticks with you. Applying empathy as a product designer will help keep your customers at the forefront of product design. Ross Smith is the Director of Engineering at Microsoft, and he discusses how he uses stories to engender empathy.
Design at Scale: Behind the Scenes (Videoconference)
For the April 29th edition of our Enterprise Experience Community Call (11am ET), we take a “behind the scenes” look at the creation of the our new conference ‘Design at Scale’. This involves roundtable discussion on “scale”, moderated by Kelly Goto, followed by lightning-style peeks into two speakers’ talks:
- Surya Vanka, founder/chief designer of Authentic Design & formerly UX Director at Microsoft, on his method of “swarms” to foster creativity
- Wendy Johansson, Global Product Experience Leader, Amazon
Opening Keynote: Breaking Conway’s Law–or How to Work Differently and Not Ship Your Org Chart
If doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, most enterprise product teams are insane. In today’s world, shipping truly innovative, customer-obsessed experiences means that we must break down silos and collaborate in new ways. In this talk, Head of Product (CPO) at Nextdoor, Tatyana Mamut, PhD–who also led multi-functional product teams at Amazon, Salesforce, and IDEO–draws upon experiences at enterprise companies that managed to break Conway’s Law and ship innovative product experiences by working across silos and functions.
Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety — the shared belief that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and collaboration — just the types of behavior that lead to successful products and services.
Creating psychological safety in a workplace – although at times a challenge – can be done. This interactive talk will present the key action steps that DesignOps professionals can immediately take to boost psychological safety in their design teams and create psychological safety between cross-functional teams.
Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety — the shared belief that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and collaboration — just the types of behavior that lead to successful products and services.
Creating psychological safety in a workplace – although at times a challenge – can be done. This interactive talk will present the key action steps that DesignOps professionals can immediately take to boost psychological safety in their design teams and create psychological safety between cross-functional teams.
Building a New Home for the Atlassian Design System (Videoconference)
Having a design system is a de facto necessity when building cohesive enterprise software. The challenge is how does it all come together with a single location, a source of truth, a website? How does a cross-functional team marshal the resources with political and technical willpower to achieve this goal? It’s no easy feat as Jennie Yip, Atlassian design systems lead, explains in this Medium essay. This fireside chat will dig deeper into the problems addressed and lessons learned, with Jennie and also Charles Lee, the engineering lead. Hearing their stories will inspire and inform all of us in our design system journeys. We hope you will join us!
The Rise of Meta-Design: A Starter Playbook (Videoconference)
Against increasing automation and instrumentation, community curator Uday Gajendar argues we will see the rise of what he calls meta-design, whose aspects are strategic, humanistic, and — dare we say — philosophic. It’s about designing the conditions for good design to thrive, for the long term, with a sense for continuity of value. So, how does someone operationalize behaviors and spiritualize values into an organization’s ethos? This talk offers complementary models to shape and own dialogues around meta-design with cross-functional peers, based upon Uday’s own leadership experiences. The first model is grounded on what Uday calls “vectors of influence” while the second model is focused on “scopes of craft.” This talk’s goal is to inspire and equip designers to lead what’s next for our profession, or at least the beginnings of it!
How UX Research Hit It Big in Las Vegas
Directly experiencing research with customers has a powerful focusing effect on teams and decision-making. This case study describes how we created a massively scaled customer research program at Autodesk, in coordination with our large user conference, Autodesk University in Las Vegas, and how we then synthesized and shared the customer insights back with our employees. This program has helped cross-functional teams make better product decisions, deepen customer empathy, and break down silos. We’ll share lessons learned and the keys to success of this program that invites anyone in the company to conduct customer research.
Lives on the Line: The Stakes of UX at the Scale of Government
The mere idea of interacting with the DMV or the IRS makes any of us groan. But what if a dysfunctional government service is what’s standing between you and the ability to keep your house, feed your family, or get a kidney? Hear from Marina Martin, the most recent Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, about the trials, tribulations, and ultimate successes of her team’s fight to get usable healthcare application into the hands of our nation’s Veterans. She’ll cover key tactics for leaders in bureaucracies of all sizes to prioritize and drive the end user amid regulations, red tape, and committee meetings through stories from her five years in the federal government.
Christian Crumlish: Product Management for UX People
What connects product designers and UXers? And does that connection help in the transition from UX to product management?
In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, you’ll meet Christian Crumlish, Founder of Design in Product and author of the soon-to-be released Product Management for UX People. Christian and Lou deep dive into the world of product management and its relationship with UX, as well as the advantages design practitioners share when moving into product management roles.
Highlights from this discussion include:
• Understanding the current state of product management relative to UX;
• The superpower designers can tap into when communicating effectively, and how that skill is inherently utilized by product management folks (the “language of the bosses”);
• How designers/strategists/researchers share an advantage by shifting to product management through intuitively asking questions such as “how will we grow?” and “how can we keep this going?” with consideration to cost-effective solutions;
• The need to be decisive in the face of fairly complex issues across the time-horizon; and
• Why honing in on the value of listening closely to those who work adjacent to product managers will help define the cross-functional roadmap.
