Challenge Your Assumptions

Agenda

09:15
UXDX Introduction
Vision

Overview of the UXDX model

UXDX Introduction
Execution

Overview of the UXDX model

09:30
Business Agility in a Siloed Environment
Vision Business Outcomes

The functional organisation structure optimises for cost efficiency which is critical for companies that produce large volume, standardised and low cost products. Digital businesses create individual, bespoke, high cost, high margin products - the exact opposite of the traditional manufacturing approach. These digital organisations need to optimise for responsiveness over cost efficiency.

How do companies optimise for responsiveness? What complications does this pose as more traditional companies that enter the digital space?

Researching the Problem
Execution Continuous Research

Research teams can stick to using the research methods they are most familiar with but is that the best method for your team and in turn the customer? This session will break down the multiple research methods you can use and which you should use depending for your situation.

10:00
Continuous Team Discovery
Execution Continuous Research

Building software is complex. When faced with technical decisions on product direction you may be relying on research that was conducted without these questions in mind. Moving to a continuous discovery model enables teams to gain a greater understanding of their customers over time as well as allow for more targeted investigation into specific problems as they arise during delivery. 

10:05
Kevin Lee, VP & Head of Design
Choosing Metrics That Inspire Action

Kevin Lee, VP & Head of Design, Visa Inc.

Vision Business Outcomes

When organisations are structured around individual products then alignment is critical to avoid challenges. How do organisations communicate the business goals without being directive in terms of the features that teams need to build? How does a team identify and set KPIs that are aligned to the business strategy? And how to avoid vanity metrics along the way?

10:40
Break


Assumptions/ Bets / Experiments: How to manage the opportunity tree
Execution

How do you know what to build to meet your customers needs? How do you know what you are building is the best way to address that customer problem? This is where assumptions, bets and experiments come into play. What are the best practices for managing and tracking to ensure that you deliver the best outcomes

11:10
Alan Klement, Author
How to Identify your Customer's needs

Alan Klement, Author, When Coffee and Kale Compete

Vision Customer Outcomes

Companies exist to meet the needs of their customers. But often companies make strategic bets based on limited research or opinions, and failure rates are too high. How can you increase the chances of success by understanding the needs of your customers? How do you map the customer needs to your business goals?

Break


11:45
Definition of Done
Vision Customer Outcomes

Done is very contentious in teams. The definition varies based on the authority of the team - done can be at test sign off or at deployment. As teams move away from functional silos towards outcomes how does the definition of Done change? And what impact does this have on the way of working?

Fabienne Hansen, Head of Product Innovation & Design
Lean Prototyping: Failing Quick & Often

Fabienne Hansen, Head of Product Innovation & Design, Mercedes-Benz

Execution

The cheapest code is the code not written. How can you validate your ideas before you invest too much? There are different options and approaches from desirability to usability when you're trying to validate the market. Learn how to speed up your feedback cycles with effective prototypes.

12:20
Break


Decomposing Problems: Breaking Down Ideas into Small Increments
Execution Architecting for Change

There is no value until we build it all! When faced with strong opinions how can you convince people of the options for breaking down delivery into iterations that you can test and validate? And how do you communicate both the increments and big picture to your team and stakeholders?

12:55
Lunch & Networking


Break


13:20
Michael Gough, Vice President of Product Design
Design for Pattern

Michael Gough, Vice President of Product Design , Uber

Vision Aligning your Process

In this session Michal will look at how to design digital experiences with an understanding of the impacts they have in the real world. He will look at some of the issues and opportunities that they face  at Uber as they design and build at global scale. 
 

Lunch & Networking


13:55
Continuous Improvement at Scale
Vision Aligning your Process


Rashi Khurana, VP of Engineering
Emergent Design

Rashi Khurana, VP of Engineering, Shutterstock

Execution Architecting for Change

One of the biggest criticisms of agile is that you will spend more time redesigning your architecture than if you had factored in known requirements from the start.

How do teams limit the risk of changes to their architecture while building large and on-going applications?

14:30
Break


Engin Akyol, CTO
Infrastructure Refactoring: Transitioning from hero culture to automated infrastructure managed by teams

Engin Akyol, CTO, Distil Networks

Execution Continuous Delivery

When we started Distil Networks seven years ago, we embraced a get it done mentality so that our development and infrastructure could match our growth. Years later, we were almost crushed under the weight of the enormous technical debt we incurred and the ingrained hero culture we built while growing our business. This talk will explore the key things to consider for other companies that find themselves in a similar situation using our experience at Distil Networks as a case study. 

15:00
From Projects to Products
Vision Enabling your Team

Projects have been the dominant form of software delivery since software was seen as a necessary cost for many companies. As software becomes a differentiator and speed becomes critical the overheads of projects becomes a challenge. In addition to the long lead times, the temporary nature of projects leads to overheads in team formation as well as a lack of code ownership which leads to the inevitable clean up projects.

How does the product structure solve these problems? How does that work from a governance and funding perspective? How do company wide changes take place in this structure? 

Break


15:35
Sonja Radenkovic , Head of UX Design
Adapting your Leadership Style

Sonja Radenkovic , Head of UX Design, TomTom

Vision Enabling your Team

Giving the team outcomes to achieve increases their ownership of the solution. However in order to be autonomous, the team needs alignment and competency. The business, customer and process steps enable alignment but teams will need support in order to become truly competent in all of the skills required to deliver.

How do you balance upskilling people and giving direction with supporting them to become autonomous?

Going Serverless
Execution Continuous Delivery

Bakers don't farm the fields and mill the grain yet product teams are still worrying about the full stack of their solutions, right down to operating system patches and memory limits.

This hands on session will look at how easy it is to incorporate cloud services and infrastructure as code into your applications and how to take advantage of existing services so you can focus on your business logic and differentiator.

16:10
What Does the Future Customer Look Like
Vision Closing talk

With an aging population, climate change and many other scenarios we don't even know about, the needs of our customers are going to change rapidly over the next decade. This session will look at what to expect and what you and your team should be planning for over the coming years. 

Closing
Execution Closing session


09:15
Opening remarks
Vision Opening remarks


09:30
Kevin Clark, UX Lead
Aligning Business and Customer Outcomes

Kevin Clark, UX Lead, Shopify

Vision Business Outcomes

Successful products deliver on both the customer and the business needs, but aligning the two can be challenging. Maintaining alignment while the team deals with the complexities of implementation even more so.

How can teams map their activities back to the business and customer KPIs?

10:00
Beyond Budgeting
Vision Business Outcomes

Nobody likes budgeting and criticising budgets is not new. Rather than complaining, companies are experimenting with more lean and adaptive models that deliver on the separate intentions of targets, forecasts and governance.

Having started as an independent movement by accountants, the principles align perfectly with the business agility principles. How do you implement these changes in your organisation?

A/B Testing at Scale
Execution Continuous Research

When teams move to outcomes they need to be able to confirm that their work has delivered on the expected benefits and not some external factor. As teams scale up their releases, managing the number of concurrent tests becomes more difficult.

This session will look at how to build and scale an experimentation culture that can run hundreds if not thousands of tests a year.

10:40
Break


Challenges in Data Analytics
Execution Continuous Research

Aligning your business and customer KPIs is only half the battle. You need to ensure that you are able to capture the key primary and secondary KPIs that enable you to track. With each small frequent release you need ot ensure that your analytics are always consistent and as you release at scale the challenges become more complex. 

11:10
Yolanda Martin, Head of Platform Design
Communicating your Customer's Needs

Yolanda Martin, Head of Platform Design, Farfetch

Vision Customer Outcomes

How do you communicate the goals of your customers with your team and with the wider organisation? With customer journey maps, you can get a sense of your customers' motivations, their needs and pain points. But where do you start? How do you design effective maps that can push your team forward?

Break


11:45
Remi Guyot, VP Product
Incorporating the Customer into the Delivery

Remi Guyot, VP Product, BlaBlaCar

Vision Customer Outcomes

Product management is more than just the Scrum Product Owner role. How do product managers manage the big picture vision with the small picture decisions? What are the warning signs of weak product management? How do you support effective product management in your organisation?

Development IS Design
Execution

Timelines in design impact on the quality of the output. The same is true for development. Development is design, in that writing code is writing the blueprints for a program to run. The build actually takes place when a customer runs the application.

Given the concept of development as design, what impact does this have on estimation and how we factor in:
* Have the team experience with the technology?
* Have the team experience with the domain?
* Have the team experience with each other?

12:20
Break


Yvonne So, Principal UX Designer
Dual track Agile

Yvonne So, Principal UX Designer, Intuit

Execution

In software there are two key types of work - discovery and delivery. However, that doesn't mean there are different people doing those jobs. If the whole team is responsible for product success, not just getting things built, then the whole team needs to understand and contribute to both kinds of work.

Dual track agile and the UXDX model both convey the approach of design and development working together. 

12:55
Break


13:20
Deciding on the Right Process
Vision Aligning your Process

There is no right process for every situation. Different circumstances require different approaches. So how should you decide on the right approach? What ways should you look at problems to determine the best path forward?

13:55
Vinay Ramani, Chief Product Officer
Evolution of Product Development

Vinay Ramani, Chief Product Officer, Pipedrive

Vision Aligning your Process

What is the agile process? There is no clear answer as the principles behind agile are people over process. What is interesting though is how principle has enabled software delivery processes to evolve over time.

From Waterfall to Agile Development to Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment and beyond. What have been the drivers behind each step and for those still on the journey what are the challenges and pitfalls to watch out for along the way?

Micro-Stack
Execution Architecting for Change

This session will go hands-on into the micro stack: microfrontends, microservices and beyond.

What are the considerations for adopting this approach? How small should you go? How does coordination work at each level? What challenges need to be overcome? 

14:30
Break


UAT Validation in Production
Execution Continuous Delivery

UAT is challenging because you need a production-like server with production-like data. With the challenges of data protection as well as maintaining server consistency, wouldn't it be easier to use production?

How do you ensure that users don't see bad code? What about database changes? Find out the answers to these questions and more

15:00
Enabling Teams through Governance
Vision Enabling your Team

Autonomy in teams works when teams are given the authority and independence to deliver. A critical enabler is also clearly defined constraints such as KPIs, customer segments, team size and how the team will be governed. Rather than governance being a blocker, teams need to embrace it as a support.

How should teams be governed with the technology they use? How are teams successfully governed the outcomes they are achieving?

Team Ownership - Who Owns Production
Execution Continuous Delivery

Developers are too valuable to have supporting production issues. But then again they might have caused the issues. Should developers have to triage the issues found? Is it productive to find issues in their code or unproductive dealing with other people's problems? In this talk you'll hear from a team who have taken end-to-end ownership and the rationale behind the decision. 

15:35
2 Heads are Better than 1
Vision Enabling your Team

Pairing looks like it should be bad - you can get twice the work done if they work separately. But design and development work is not as linear as manual labour. By pairing, people can focus better, resolve issues quicker and deliver higher quality outputs. Is this enough to cover the overheads?

16:10
Russ Wilson, Head of UX for Google Cloud Platform
Building a Strong Team for Strong Results - Measurement at Scale

Russ Wilson, Head of UX for Google Cloud Platform, Google

Vision Closing talk

Teamwork remains the ultimate competitive advantage. However, teamwork is a soft skill which isn't being tracked in many organisations and they say "What gets measured gets managed". How can you measure teamwork? How can you improve teamwork in your organisations? Russ will discuss how this is achieved at scale with one of the largest UX teams in the world

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Tickets