Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
We’ve spent a full-day exploring the challenges and opportunities in product/UX collaborations, and looking at those challenges and opportunities not only from a UX perspective, but also from a PM point of view. In this follow-up session, we’ll look back to the morning’s empathy mapping session, and take a beat to reflect those two roles and how they relate to one another.
A PM State of Mind: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 1
No doubt you’ve heard of empathy mapping– the simple, yet powerful tool often employed by product teams to attain a deeper understanding of what their customers think and feel in order to deliver a better user experience.
In this interactive, two-part activity, we’ll put product managers in the place of the customer, mapping the motivators, external and internal influences, and actions that make them tick. By the end of this exercise, you’ll have gained insights into who your PM is, and how you can best connect with them!
Note: Part 2 of this activity will take place during the second half of the day.
Adaptable Org Design for Resilient Times
Making design simple in siloed and dated governmental organization with a baggage of tradition and slumped public reception is not an easy task. This talk presents a case study transforming a large government-regulated gambling monopoly from the product-driven world of the past into the emergent and rapidly shifting markets where the customer is placed front and center. How to refresh an organization without causing more obstacles? Organizing for continuous learning and allowing natural competence development can be achieved with reviewing the foundations of the business model and design organization. This talk presents solutions from the presented case study.
Moving from Execution to Strategy as a Designer with Catt Small
Lou sits down with Catt Small, Director of Product Design at All Turtles, who will be speaking at the Design in Product Conference on December 6, 2022. They discuss how designers and product managers can learn each other’s lingo and build relationships that will make both their jobs easier. Together, they sort through different workplace scenarios that new and more seasoned designers can encounter and Catt dispenses wisdom she has picked up throughout her career.
Catt is a product design leader, game maker, and front-end web developer. She is currently the Director of Product Design at All Turtles, a globally distributed product studio solving meaningful problems. Catt has done design work for companies of all sizes including Asana, Etsy, SoundCloud, and Nasdaq. She started coding around the age of 10 and designing at the age of 15. She graduated from SVA with a BFA in Graphic Design in 2011 and later received an MS in Integrated Digital Media from NYU in 2016. Catt also makes awkward video games, writes about professional development, and draws artwork of all kinds.
State of DesignOps 2021: Where Careers in Design Lead Today
Angelos Arnis is a strategic designer focusing on delivering experiences with humane principles. For the past 10 years, he has been working with product/service companies and startups, both in early and high growth stages.
Angelos is currently changing the ways of working at Posti Group, Finland’s postal service. He is a co-founder at Joint Frontiers, and a co-host of ‘Human, the designer’. Additionally, he is a community organizer at IxDA Helsinki, as well as an alumnus organizer of Joint Futures, DSCONF, & Junction Hackathon. In his free time, he enjoys making music, and playing computer games.
In this talk, Angelos discusses the State of DesignOps 2021 Global Report, and will be sharing this information during this year’s DesignOps Summit 2021 on September 29 – October 1. Angleos began his journey to better understand how one can position their career in design, which then led to exploring more questions that can present a wider range of answers on the subject.
The quantitative data collected for the report was done in the form of surveys, and Angelos has provided us with valuable insights around the state of design operations. Additionally, he will present relevant qualitative research during this year’s summit program. Some highly-anticipated questions Angelos answers in this podcast include:
1) What DesignOps career opportunities are available to professionals in the field?
2) What ladder-climbing opportunities currently exist in design?
3) How would you describe the positioning of typical design practices?
4) What surprises you most about the commonalities you’ve identified?
AI as a Design Partner: How to Get the Most Out of AI Tools to Scale Your Process
I am a Senior Product Designer at a large tech company, leading the Video Gen AI and Growth programs. This talk is a case study about leveraging AI tools to scale and systematize your design process. Some examples include creating better and more thorough user journey lists that capture all types of users, reducing the risk of excluding some users. I will also talk about how to have a Systems Design mindset about UX programs, including how to scale your work across teams and organizations for broader impact.
Closing Keynote: Design at Scale
More than 50 years ago, Thomas Watson Jr., the second President of IBM declared, “Good design is good business”. Today, the global company continues to operate on the belief that human experiences drive business. Doug Powell, Distinguished Designer at IBM, will expose what it means to practice design at the global tech company, exploring the inner workings of the largest UX design operation in the world. He will also elaborate on a new Forrester Research study examining the value of design and the design thinking practice at IBM.
Best Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System
Design systems are essential for creating cohesive and scalable products. By providing a shared set of design guidelines, components, and styles, design systems help ensure consistency and efficiency throughout the design process. In this talk we’ll go through the best practices when creating and maintaining a Design System including different strategies, approaches to token creation, making good use of overrides, setting up principles and guidelines and how to scale a design system so that it becomes useful for design a dev teams alike.
From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice
Natalie Marie Dunbar joins Lou to discuss the lonely pursuit that is content strategy. She also digs into what it means to build a content strategy practice—whether you’re just starting out as a solo practitioner, scaling up in a large organization, or trying to make a case for your CS practice’s value. Her new Rosenfeld Media book, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice, serves as a “companion” to address this loneliness as much as it is a guide to the resources needed to create a sustainable content practice.
This episode offers a preview of what Natalie calls the Content Strategy Practice Blueprint. There are five components to that blueprint, including making the business case, building strong relationships, creating frameworks and tools, and establishing meaningful measures of success.
Introduction by our Conference Chair
Design in Product’s Inaugural Conference Chair, Emcee, and Chief Curator Christian Crumlish takes the stage to share the conference agenda, go over important attendee information, announcements and housekeeping guidelines, and introduce the day’s first speaker.
