Recorded Event: Warm Gun 2014 Talks from the conference

Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design

In Rise of the DEO, Maria Giudice and her coauthor explore the intersection of creativity and business smarts. They look at how and why this unlikely coupling produces leaders capable of solving our increasingly complex business problems.

At Warm Gun, Maria will lead a conversation that focuses on techniques, tactics, and intuitions that create stronger leaders. She’ll untangle the characteristics and qualities that distinguish great creative leaders. She’ll introduce you to today’s role models and rule breakers. Join us to uncover your own skills to build, revive, or reinvent the next generation of great companies.
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Fostering Effective Collaboration in a Global Environment

PJ’s team recently transitioned from reactive, agency-like project work to a proactive, self-driven roadmap. They had to figure out a way to collaborate efficiently across 5 different disciplines—and a bunch of time zones—to make awesome products for their customers. And, they had to convince everyone else at Amazon to get with the program.

Find out from PJ how talking and listening can be the key to creating meaningful change. He’ll share everything his team learned about winning allies, building responsive systems and processes, and meeting the needs of a user base that spans the globe.

Growing Your Userbase with Better Onboarding

Frustration drives people to sign up for products in hopes of improving their lives. The space between the intolerable “before” and the ideal “after” is your project’s “improvement trajectory.” And once this is defined, it’s easier to identify key moments in the customer journey and match them to design patterns.

Samuel shares strategies that help you stop hemorrhaging signups. You’ll learn to create quality onboarding experiences that target your users’ frustrations and move them from A to B in their lives, instead of just A to B in your app.

Thought Experiments for Data-Driven Design

Aviva Rosenstein’s got a mad love for research methods and a fascination for how people use technology. Before joining DocuSign, Aviva spent a decade helping Agile teams ship usable, useful web and mobile applications.

Product managers sometimes assume that getting user feedback is simply a matter of putting a text field on a form so users can share their reactions. But when teams find themselves buried under an avalanche of user feedback, they realize they forgot to ask an important question: what happens to the data on the back end?

Hear the key insights Aviva and her teams at DocuSign, Salesforce and Yahoo have gained from their experiences. She’ll share how they learned to think beyond interface to establish a process for collecting relevant data by asking, “What happens next?”

Designing for Startups

Most startup designers focus on delighting customers with how their products look and feel. But if a product isn’t solving a problem or meeting a need, customers won’t care how pretty it is. So, how can design be used to help shape the core of products? And how can designers convince their teams to let them go beyond visual design?

Braden Kowitz will share his insights into what startups really need from designers, as well as his team’s “Design Sprint” process for rapid prototyping. You’ll learn how user research lets you move faster and take more risks. How to work at the right level of fidelity. And how ugly things can lead to great design.

Accomplish Big Goals With Objectives & Key Results

Christina Wodtke has devoted her career to tackling monumental tasks. She’s helped grow companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, and the New York Times. Nowadays she works with startups and entrepreneurs, sharing her strategies for success and inspiring them to pursue big goals and outlandish dreams.

Christina knows how to inspire diverse teams to work together, going all out in pursuit of a single, ultra-challenging goal. Hint: It’s not about to-do lists and accountability charts. How do you get your team to commit to bold goals? How do you stay motivated despite setbacks and disappointments? And is failure ever a viable option?

Christina Wodtke will demonstrate how she uses objectives and key results to help teams tackle and realize big goals in a methodical way, leaving nothing to chance. You’ll learn the beauty of a good fail and how regular check-ins can keep you on track to success.

Avoid Saying Yes to the Wrong Job

Job candidates and potential employers send each other the wrong messages—Amy’s spent more than 25 years watching this happen. We assume companies know what they need and that our work speaks for itself. Those assumptions land us in situations where the expectations are unrealistic and maybe even impossible. But Amy’s experience has taught her how to avoid this disaster.

Amy will help you turn interviews into a discovery process that sets expectations and evaluates options. She’ll show you how to communicate your value, ask the right questions, and get the answers you need to land the right role. Avoid the wrong fit and love what you do.

Helping Teams Become Design Independent

Abi Jones has always been about independence. She’s been helping folks feel capable from the very beginning—when she taught third grade. Abi’s more recent work on the MySpace redesign team and her current gig as an interaction designer for Google Books support that same goal: giving people confidence to tackle the hard challenges.

She recently worked with a Google team to design a flexible, reliable feedback system. Abi was reminded that jumping into a pre-existing team is hard—especially when it’s a team of engineers and you’re a designer. How do you define your role and create a model that works? How far do you take a design before production? How do you give them the skills to continue once you leave?

In her debut presentation, Abi will share how creating and modeling product principles, scoping iteration, and trusting specialists (like writers) are all part of the magic. You’ll hear about the challenges that reshaped her process.

Bringing IRL Online

What You’ll Learn

• Meet the real needs of your customers
• Build and circulate trust on your site

Product Strategy in a Growing Company

Des Traynor cares about the details. He has to—he’s responsible for customer happiness! He’s consulted with over 100 growing companies to help them shape a product strategy around their core features. He co-founded Exceptional (now part of Rackspace) and Intercom, where is currently VP of Customer Success.

Customers have opinions about how a product should evolve. It’s tricky to know when to go for it and when to draw the line. Without a strategy, products are forced into a feature matrix to win imaginary comparison wars. It’s a vicious cycle that hatches the biggest product, but rarely the best.

Strong product management requires frequent hard decisions and compromises, based on a healthy balance of data and intuition. Join Des to plan a product roadmap that focuses on growing the value—not the feature list—of your product.

You’re Hired! Strategies for Finding the Perfect Fit

In the UX world, Kim Goodwin is a big deal. A regular on the UX conference circuit. Bestselling author of “Designing for the Digital Age.” Team builder and UX evangelizer at PatientsLikeMe. Kim knows design—and designers. She’s hired, fired, and coached loads of them for her own teams and for clients, too.

Kim understands the challenges of a competitive job market. The candidate with the most impressive résumé isn’t always the smartest choice. It’s not always easy to tell the diamond-in-the-rough from the shiny-but-fake. But Kim’s figured out how to find the hidden gems.

Kim shares insights that help folks on both sides of the interview table. Learn how to define and articulate the skills you’re hiring for, and how to build a framework for evaluating candidates. Understanding what makes a good hire will help job seekers present themselves to hiring managers in the most effective manner.

Hunches, Instincts, and Trusting Your Gut

Leah Buley didn’t set out to become a one-woman UX design team. She transitioned gradually from web developer to interface designer, thanks to her knack for recognizing what separates the great from the good— and the ability to explain why. For over 15 years, Leah has helped companies learn to embrace human-centered design.

The challenge for all designers is how to critique the work, your own or someone else’s. Can you translate your gut feelings into a clear, credible point of view and communicate it to others?

Don’t miss your chance to hear Leah share simple techniques for intelligent critiquing, from evaluating information hierarchy to judging the effectiveness of layout, typography, and messaging. You’ll leave feeling more confident about trusting your gut and expressing your opinions.