Challenge Your Assumptions

• Changing from total control to autonomy at Wetransfer: A UX/design perspective
• Is autonomy realistic? Does it work? Is there balance? 
• Trying to build an autonomous team: How to get everyone part of the same team
• Streamlining your process for autonomous success

Many of us in the design community pride ourselves on being tool builders, creating products that others can use to get things done. This is, at some level, the fundamental promise of all technology. Yet if we don't pay close enough attention, our own tools can sometimes get the better of us. Whether it's a team using a prescribed design process, or a company building software to be used by the entire planet, it turns out that these tools can be used in unintended ways. They can break, or grow out of control. And so our job as designers is not just to build things, but sometimes to recognise when we need to take them apart again. In this talk Emmet will discuss some lessons learned while growing the design team at Intercom, how that relates to the broader technology industry, and why building a process for everyone to follow is less important than building a culture that can upend it.

Why would a major Las Vegas hotel consistently have a room service waiting time of 1.5 hours? Why would a major airline consistently have delays that torment a well-known design and usability consultant based in Boston? Why would a major financial services company try and cross-sell a credit card when a customer is in the middle of the highway reporting a car accident?
"What we've got here is a failure to communicate" Businesses are complex, with thousands of people, processes, business rules, systems, and products all impacting thousands of touchpoints that millions of customers interact with. If left unmanaged this complexity can be disastrous for the customer.
An organisation's biggest asset is its employees, the way they work, communicate, and collaborate. This system needs designing just as much, if not more so, than the customer-facing experiences we spend most of our time on. It's time we turned our talents inward and designed ourselves.
The concept of "Enterprise Architecture" has been around since the 80's. Management consultancies like Accenture have made it a staple offering and books have been written about it. Unfortunately, they're all wrong - or rather missing one key component.
In this example-filled, thought-provoking session the audience will be challenged to think about their organisations differently, introduced to the missing component, and given a framework and language for effecting a cultural change amongst their business and technology partners.

Knowing when to ask for budget or how to get it is the work of developing justification, long hours of discussion, relentless persuasion, and often confusing and disappointing. In this process, we often forget how to apply human-centered design approach and mindset to make the budget process more effective and supportive. In this session, how investing and building a culture and capability of pre-visualization and rapid prototyping helps generate a demand for design capacity from business stakeholders while promoting a design-driven way of working in organization.