Challenge Your Assumptions

Adding features to hardware and software products is not very difficult. Adding what people see as actual, sustained benefits is harder--and much more valuable.

User research, when done in a thoughtful, curious, and creative manner, helps our teams learn about what truly matters to people, and what their hopes and challenges are. From there we develop important insights that guide our designs-the opportunities we see for us to help people achieve their goals by the solutions we conceive and create.

We know it's essential to meet people where they are in their health, wellness, and fitness journey. It's equally important to create a flexible and compelling ecosystem, to keep people engaged, and be continuously helpful as they make progress. 

In this session, we'll review how insights guided the design of our newest and best-selling product to date, along with new experiences like female health tracking.

At Fitbit, we see our jobs as helping people be healthier, and to actually improve their lives through sustained behavior change. Powerful stuff.

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.

• Understanding the customer and their needs
• Mitigating product roadmap risks from the outset
• Rapid conceptualisation: Ensuring you have the right processes in place for building and scaling at speed
• Aligning engineering, marketing and sales teams

• The mechanics behind the process 
• Trial and error; how we got to our approach and why
• How we shifted team thinking to roll out our problem solving techniques
• How to define your success metrics 
  

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.

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.

My team is doing great. Where's everyone else
Your Epic is my Feature 

Anyone know why we're waiting so long for this API
Should we use green or blue Lets ask the Chief Product Officer
We need to get it right first time

There are few enterprises in the world that might find it tougher to become Agile and build software rapidly than a large Government organisation such as the US Air Force. But that's exactly the challenge Adam is solving through the Kessel Run project. Adam and the team are currently averaging about four months (124 days) to get a technology product from an idea on a whiteboard to operational - a task that normally would take 8 years. In his inspiring talk, Adam will talk us through his approach to becoming agile including; The problem and complexity of becoming Agile in a government Waterfall environment  Dealing with constraints; Understanding that not everybody will (or wants to) get onboard with becoming Agile - how to get around it. The structure and approach taken: Successes and lessons to date.