Challenge Your Assumptions

Agenda

09:15
UXDX Introduction
Vision

Overview of the UXDX model

UXDX Introduction
Execution

Overview of the UXDX model

09:30
Morgane Peng, Director of User Experience & Design
From Siloes to Systems: Using Design to Power Up Business Agility

Morgane Peng, Director of User Experience & Design, Societe Generale

Vision Business Outcomes

Most companies have decentralized business and product teams, which is usually good for autonomy and execution. But one decision made in isolation can seem right at the time, yet lead to a fractured user experience overall. How can companies optimise for responsiveness and reduce design entropy? This case study explains how we used design to implement system thinking into a 150-year-old bank.

Gianni Clifford, Product Design Manager
The Secrets and Synthesis of Successful UX Research

Gianni Clifford, Product Design Manager, Zendesk

Execution Continuous Research

If UX Research is the ground floor of great product design, then talking to your customers is its foundation, essential to making sure you build something stable, that will last. 


But good foundations don't come easy, they require excellent planning - before, after and during. What's the secret to a rock solid research plan? And how do guarantee we build the right thing?

10:05
Conor Walsh, Product Manager
Choosing Metrics That Inspire Action

Conor Walsh, Product Manager, Duolingo

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?

Tatiana Tretyak, Product Manager
A/B Testing at Scale

Tatiana Tretyak, Product Manager, Booking.com

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


Frederic Rivain, CTO
Supporting the Product through Continuous Delivery

Frederic Rivain, CTO, Dashlane

Execution

In this session Frederic will look at how to manage feature-flipping and A/B Testing when shipping on multiple platforms. How to manage synchronization and coordination with product marketing and as part of it, explain how Dashlane are organized with a dual track approach to support feature team delivery and platform/production maintenance in parallel.

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

Alan Klement, Partner, Revealed

Vision Customer Outcomes

Companies have historically used a list of customer needs to describe what customers want. But is that the best way to describe what customers value in a product? Are there different types of value that consumers experience and desire? How do we discover, describe, and design for these different types of value? How can we use these insights to create growth for the business?

Break


11:45
Paul Adams, SVP of Product
Definition of Done

Paul Adams, SVP of Product, Intercom

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?

Jackie Scherer, Principle Product Designer
Ideation and Prototyping: Think Bigger, Fail Quicker

Jackie Scherer, Principle Product Designer, Ripple

Execution

How can we be more courageous and confident in the way we build products?  The answer lies in the way we ideate, design, test, and refine--before any code is written.  You'll learn how to run successful ideation sessions with your working team, trying on novel ideas and taking logical leaps into the future. You'll also come away with practical methods for prototyping your best design ideas for quick user feedback.  The result is building more innovative and useful products with less risk.

12:20
Break


Tobias Jensen, Product Designers
Aligning Organizational Stakeholders with User Story Mapping

Tobias Jensen, Product Designers, Blackboard Insurance

Execution Architecting for Change

How do you achieve strategic alignment in your organization? In this session, I will go over how I use user story mapping as a way of aligning everyone from SMEs to engineers on what we're building, why we're building it and most importantly how we should prioritize work. By using this throughout the development process, companies can achieve strategic clarity, as well as better, and more successful products.

12:55
Lunch & Networking


Break


13:20
Patrick Mooney, Director of User Experience
Accelerating development using UI Frameworks

Patrick Mooney, Director of User Experience, Optum

Vision Aligning your Process

Patrick will talk about design systems and an example of how teams are positioned within a company to support other developers through the maintenance and development of a design system and UI framework. 

Lunch & Networking


13:55
Stephen McCarthy, Head of Design
Optimising your process for Responsiveness

Stephen McCarthy, Head of Design, Government Digital Service UK

Vision Aligning your Process


Rashi Khurana, VP of Engineering
War Room Warrior: How to manage war room situations

Rashi Khurana, VP of Engineering, Shutterstock

Execution Architecting for Change

Site outages and incidents are par for the course for tech companies. Solving the root cause often involves tense conversations and high-pressure situations. The war room serves as a dedicated space where the most critical team members work through these issues, but what happens when everyone gets in the room? 

The goal is clear, restore site service as quickly as possible, but there can be many approaches to getting there. In this talk, Rashi Khurana will share best practices in leading teams to troubleshoot issues and navigate incident resolutions. She will address communication strategies, people management, process implementation and managing retroactive evaluations. 

14:30
Break


Engin Akyol, VP Engineering, Bot Management
Infrastructure Refactoring: Transitioning from hero culture to automated infrastructure managed by teams

Engin Akyol, VP Engineering, Bot Management, Distil Networks (part of Imperva)

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
Marcel Putina, Product Owner
From Projects to Products

Marcel Putina, Product Owner, Degiro

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?

Panel Session
Going Serverless

Sebastian Hesse, Software Engineer, K15t

Nik Rahmel, Senior Software Engineer, BBC

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
Cindy Chastain, SVP, Global Customer Experience and Design
Creating a Tangible Product Vision

Cindy Chastain, SVP, Global Customer Experience and Design, Mastercard

Vision Closing talk

Product managers and design leads often get asked to define the vision for a product or service, but rarely does anyone agree on what that looks like.   A vision should not only connect to business strategy, it should be stable enough to withstand new learnings and pivots across the product lifecycle.  The hard part is in making it tangible enough to be actionable, without falling into the trap of big Design.  This talk will uncover how a collaborative partnership between product, design, and tech can help shape a tangible vision, that can empower and inspire teams.


Closing
Execution Closing session


09:15
Opening remarks
Vision Opening remarks


09:30
Sebastien Fabre, Head of UX, Mobile & Portals
Aligning Business and Customer Outcomes

Sebastien Fabre, Head of UX, Mobile & Portals, LEGO Group

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
Tim Hudson, SVP of UX
Design Systems

Tim Hudson, SVP of UX, Adyen

Vision Business Outcomes


Opening remarks
Execution Opening remarks


10:05
Vision


Dot Gong, Senior Product Manager
UX, DX, DSX: Developers and Data Scientists as Users

Dot Gong, Senior Product Manager, Buzzfeed

Execution Continuous Research

More and more companies nowadays are investing heavily in building infrastructure for developers and data scientists. But often, building infrastructure products are treated as pure engineering practices and differentiated from feature products.


I would like to share my experience leading a team at BuzzFeed in building user-centric infrastructure products for our developers and data scientists, and how I integrate and adapt traditional PM techniques for technical products.


Building software for our peers is a double-edged sword. On one hand, our users are technologists themselves and have immense appreciation for well-designed infrastructure and tools. On the other hand, it is very tempting for us as developers to make assumptions about those folks with whom we work closely. When building tools for data scientists, it is especially crucial to keep in mind that they have their own distinct workflows and needs.

10:40
Break


Marie-Laure Thuret, Technical Product Manager
How to empower developers to build a greater user experience

Marie-Laure Thuret, Technical Product Manager, Algolia

Execution Continuous Research

From the very beginning of Algolia's journey, focusing on Developer Experience was key. More than 6 years later with four dedicated squads on that topic, it couldn't be even more true.

In this talk we'll look at how giving developers the tools they'll love to use results in a massive impact in the experience of the end users. We'll dig into how the combination of key product enablers, available pre-packaged best practices and good documentation can contribute directly to it

11:10
Marja Ojala, Lead Designer
Communicating your Customer's Needs

Marja Ojala, Lead Designer, Finnair

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
Yolanda Martin, Head of Platform Design
Why User Centered Design doesn't work

Yolanda Martin, Head of Platform Design, Farfetch

Vision Customer Outcomes


Jonathan Rigby, Director of Technology
How long is a piece of string?: The key to solving the conundrum of software estimation

Jonathan Rigby, Director of Technology , Expedia Group

Execution

We've probably all been asked to come up with a set of software estimates for a project with very little detail, very little time to do it and plenty of quizzical looks when it's given. Writing software is very rarely like painting a room, where a person can reasonably give an estimate to the nearest day.

Between tech debt, lack of useful documentation and a new requirement never done before, it is very hard for a software team and the lead developer to come up with what the business often wants - an accurate estimate! (if such a thing were possible).

So, what is the solution? Storypointing, MVPs, spikes and an iterative approach all help towards a goal of better software estimation and so success of a project, but the best, single most important element I have seen is the existence of trust between a software team and product owner.  On the product owner that they wont make promises to the business based on estimates and on the software team that they will give an honest assessment of the work involved and not inflate estimates.

When it works it is a powerful thing and is a million times more effective than the 'them' and 'us' attitudes that exist in some places and that do nobody any good.

12:20
Break


John Schrag, Director of Experience Design
Dual track Agile

John Schrag, Director of Experience Design, Autodesk

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
Yvonne So, Principal UX Designer
Deciding on the Right Process

Yvonne So, Principal UX Designer, Intuit

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
Panel Session
Remote Team Management

Dana Lawson, VP of Engineering, GitHub

Shane Nolan, SVP Technology, Consumer & Business Services, IDA Ireland

Vision Aligning your Process


Panel Session
Architecture Debate

Nik Crabtree, Lead Principal Software Engineer, ASOS

Richard Rodger, CTO, Voxgig

Execution Architecting for Change

In this debate our candidates will discuss:

Enforcing Good Design

Services Challenges

Total Cost of Ownership

Technical Debt

14:30
Break


Sarah Davies, UAT Lead
UAT Validation in Production

Sarah Davies, UAT Lead, Vodafone

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
Michael Gough, Vice President of Product Design
Design for Pattern

Michael Gough, Vice President of Product Design , Uber

Vision Enabling your Team

The future of Uber is far from determined, and the decisions and actions of Gough will help define it."The core of design is empathy. That's the starting point no matter what. That will always be how you address any product challenge. The classic way products were developed was you solved functional needs, and then maybe business needs, and then you lean heavily into human needs over time. This arc, all of the [PR] challenges aside, is a natural arc. The next big step is to become a company that's really, really good at connecting with people and people's needs."

Christopher Slowe, CTO & Co-Founder
Team Ownership - Who Owns Production

Christopher Slowe, CTO & Co-Founder, Reddit

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
Gerrit Kaiser, Design Leader
Reimagining design systems at Spotify

Gerrit Kaiser, Design Leader, Spotify

Vision Enabling your Team


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

Russ Wilson, Head of UX , 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

Join Us in Dublin and Rethink Product Delivery

Tickets