Lessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey

Lots of legacy enterprise product suites are being re-platformed to become updated SaaS offerings and offer richer, responsive, device agnostic experiences. While the benefits of such initiatives are many for the business and their customers, it also comes wrought with many major challenges in strategy, technology, time to market and managing change and disruption for the existing customer base. This talk will present a case study and 10 learnings from a 4-year long re-platforming journey of UKG Ready, a HCM product suite. As we follow the journey, we will also learn from UX strategy and contributions at each stage.

But Do Your Insights Scale?

Overcoming stakeholder objections and positioning qualitative data as an input to business and product strategy. When stakeholders have access to real-time data about millions of user interactions, how can qualitative researchers articulate the value of small-sample studies for product and business strategy? In this case study, we’ll show how we used our insights chops to understand stakeholder motivations and concerns, and get qualitative research a seat at the table shaping Google Assistant’s 2020 strategy. We’ll share learnings about how human-centered researchers can effectively collaborate with functions like data science and business strategy, and how to persuade analytically-minded stakeholders to embrace rich qualitative data about people’s needs and motivations as an input to business strategy.

Whole Product Thinking: Expanding beyond problem and solution space thinking (Videoconference)

Join us for this session with Sean McKay, Founder, Product Strategy & Design Consultant at Whole Product Thinking.

Why is it so hard to align everyone so we can deliver products that our customers love? It’s a question that will steal your soul (and your job) if you let it. I believe it’s more important now than ever that we transcend the nagging industry debates, power struggles, and process wars that are blocking us all from doing our best work for our customers. In this session, I’ll share a new “Whole Product Thinking” framework I’ve been developing. It’s intended to help structure conversations and align teams around the fundamental concepts needed to deliver human-centered products that are meaningful to users and effective for business. My approach centers on the ‘what’ and ‘why,’ deliberately separating the ‘how’ to allow organizations the freedom to choose approaches and methods that align with their unique contexts, development philosophies, and company culture.

Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone

There is nothing more frustrating than dedicating your blood, sweat, and tears to developing a product, only to see it shut down for no particular reason. We still lack standards for measuring potential opportunities and solutions—so leadership continues to base decisions on intuition, personal experience, and other factors that often barely correlate with success. Organizations large and small need agreed-upon measures of potential product-market fit for their concepts and solutions, ones that help establish unmet needs and lead to designs that users understand and want to use.

The DesignOps team at Athenahealth has solved this problem by creating a standardized measurement framework—including qualitative and quantitative instruments—that helps product teams measure their concepts and solutions early and often. These are measures that leaders can use to make informed investment decisions across the larger portfolio, and that free product teams to be awesome at what they do: designing, managing, and developing products that lead to better experiences for users.

Climate Design Product Showcase (Videoconference)

If you’re interested in seeing the impact user experience designers can have on products tackling climate change, please join us for a free “show and tell” session. Moderated by Michael Leggett, we’ll hear from Manos Saratsis from Station A, Marissa Cui from MIT, and Rachel He from Stripe. They’ll recount the problems, their design solutions, and what they learned along the way.

Coffee with Lou #4: Taking a Peek Under the Rosenbot’s Hood (Videoconference)

What happens when you cross an eager librarian, a happy puppy, and 800 UX experts? You get the Rosenbot—Rosenfeld’s new GPT-4 level chatbot, trained on our books and hundreds of hours of conference and community call recordings. What went into creating the Rosenbot? Lou is joined by SimplyPut’s Peter van Dijck, an old friend from the IA community and the chief architect of the Rosenbot. If you’re beginning your journey into developing generative AI products, you’ll want to join Lou and Peter to learn from their lessons, ask questions, and share your own thoughts on AI’s role in making curated content more useful and impactful.

[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist

In this talk, I’ll delve into how AI has helped to catapult me from a researcher to a strategist—a “super researcher” if you like. AI tools have streamlined my research processes, enhanced stakeholder communication, and freed up more time for strategic thinking. I’ll demonstrate how rapid data synthesis and efficient communication via AI have led to faster project turnarounds, allowing me to have better relationships with stakeholders and giving me more time to think and move more strategically in my company. We’ll illustrate the significant time-saving advantages of AI integration in UX research, positioning it as a crucial tool for staying ahead in a fast-paced tech world.

Takeaways

• Strategies for using AI to expedite UX research processes
• Techniques for leveraging AI in enhancing stakeholder communication
• Insights into transforming data analysis into strategic UX decision-making
• Demonstration of the efficiency of AI in UX project turnaround
• Understanding of AI’s role in maintaining agility in fast-paced tech environments
• Practical tips on integrating AI tools into UX research workflows

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.

Design Ops Metrics

This session will detail how we are capturing metrics on product development and resource allocation. We will discuss how we are capturing people’s time on task to get us to a standard set of recipes that we can use when planning and budgeting for new products. We will discuss how we captured and identified tasks that could be handled by a 3rd party offshore vendor to free up our in-house designer who needs to be focused on strategic and innovative work.

C’mon Get Happy

Team happiness is an important and oft-mentioned DesignOps metric, but we need to reframe how we think about it. No human* can “”make”” their team happy, and it’s folly to measure ourselves by that impossible standard. But what we _can_ do is create opportunities for our teams—opportunities to get weird, share freely, give feedback, encourage each other, and create their own team culture. And they get to choose whether and how they take advantage of those opportunities.

*If you are a literal kitten, you may indeed be able to *make* people happy just by existing.