2 day virtual workshop
November 30-December 1 2023, 9:30am-1:30pm PT
Are you a SaaS designer who is sick of being unheard when you fight for ideas you believe in? Frustrated by how often Design gets left out of important decisions that impact your customers? Wish your PM would take a sabbatical so you could call all the shots based on user insights instead of assumptions?
In this workshop, you’ll learn and practice techniques to become a more strategic SaaS designer. Catt Small, an industry leading Staff Product Designer, will draw on her experience at Etsy, Soundcloud, and Asana to help you identify and navigate the political roadblocks that keep many designers stuck in the ideological playpen at SaaS companies. You’ll form alliances with designers from across the industry in the fight for better product decisions and higher-quality user experiences.
Who is this workshop for
- Senior Designers who want to make a substantial and meaningful impact on products and their subscribers
- Staff and Principal Designers who want to truly be heard, not just seen by peer functions
- Lead Designers who are frustrated by being left out of important decisions that affect their work
In this workshop, you’ll learn to…
Proactively advocate for yourself
We’ll cover techniques to ensure that you’re involved in decisions that affect you before it’s too late. You’ll build the ability to identify—and elbow your way into—discussions that impact your work.
Get heard by your collaborators
Have you ever lost your cool because research insights keep getting ignored? Are you feeling gaslit by bad product decisions that prioritize short-term wins? We’ll cover ways to build a proper case and audience for your ideas so the right people will listen.
Contribute more than just pixels
If you’re tired of teammates asking you to clean up presentations and giving you sketches to mock up, we’ll discuss ways to show them what you’re really made of. You’ll flex your expectation-setting skills so you can do less of the grunt work.
Build cross-functional trust and support
Transform your relationship with other functions from an adversarial, reluctant series of transactions to a healthy, symbiotic partnership so you can cut through the politics and do what matters most.
Agenda
Day 1 – Building your voice
- Design-led SaaS product development
- Communicating the business value of design activities and artifacts
- Investing in collaborator relationships
Day 2 – Scaling your impact
- Redirecting pressure to create space for strategy
- How org design affects your work
- The future of SaaS design
