Topic: Team Management

Collaboration or Fighting? Ways to use Common Language when working on UX/UI

What You’ll Learn

• Turn developers into your allies
• Discern who’s who in the project
• Transform chaos into order
• Make the complicated, easy

Creating Research Ambassadors & Co-creators

What You’ll Learn

• How to incorporate cards and tailored workshops into your research delivery
• How to make what you've learned memorable
• How to get started with your new, larger research team

Managing Projects Better by Managing Expectations

What You’ll Learn

• The importance of a project scope document
• What kinds of meetings to schedule, when, and why
• How to use your communication style to maximize results

Building a Continuous Learning Team: Escaping the Stagnation Sandpit

What You’ll Learn

• Encourage a growth mindset
• Use the stages of learning as a framework to teach and learn
• Learn simple practices to get started

Making the Most of Multicultural Teams

What You’ll Learn

• Understand what diversity in thought is—and why it’s important
• Learn the cultural metrics that provide insight on your team
• Get tools for working with, not against, multicultural differences

Building UX Teams

What You’ll Learn

• Understand the skills your company needs to support its work, and the design talent that can provide them
• Use hiring best practices to uncover the right candidates for positions and build a multi-disciplinary team
• Lift your designers up by creating a culture of support that focuses on their strengths, provides mentorship and growth opportunities
• Keep your designers around by communicating their career trajectory, providing management and other training, and empowering them to do their best work

Good Gathering

What You’ll Learn

• Gain a fresh perspective on the potential for group sessions
• Learn the building blocks of great group sessions
• Learn seven nearly facilitation-free methods

Scaling Lean: Project, Program, Portfolio

What You’ll Learn

• Understand objectives and key results (OKRs) that keep the customer at the center of the conversation, at all levels of your organization
• Get four principles to stay customer-centric and evidence-based as teams and companies grow
• Learn how to lead growing teams who are interested in working in a Lean/Agile way
• Discover why there is no silver bullet to scaling Lean/Agile practices

Preventing the Swoop-and-Poop with Successful Stakeholder Engagement

What You’ll Learn

• Identify if your approach is contributing to bad stakeholder behavior
• Extract the best information from stakeholders early in the process
• Build your interviewing and communication skills to get to the heart of what they want, and what you need to do to deliver it
• Engage stakeholders throughout the project to get the feedback you need and help them feel their contribution is important
• Adjust your stakeholder approach based on the organizational culture in which they work

Making Sense of Research Findings

What You’ll Learn

• Learn what you can do before, during, and after research activities to make gathering insights more efficient later on
• Gain confidence in breaking down large sets of research data into manageable areas to focus on
• Improve the way you communicate research insights to clients and colleagues

Navigating Challenging Content Strategy Conversations

What You’ll Learn

• Prepare for feedback
• Manage difficult conversations
• Build a better conversation

Teaching UX

What You’ll Learn

• Identify potential UX talent
• Find compelling UX projects
• Leverage the educational power of usability testing
• Learn effective mentoring skills

Designing Remotely

What You’ll Learn

• Strategize for people and their contexts
• Spend time designing your digitally defined workplace
• Rethink process
• Manage outcomes

Building a Culture of Design

What You’ll Learn

• Define what a culture of design is — and what it isn’t
• Understand the transformative power of design thinking
• Recognize your role in transforming your company culture
• Develop a game plan for effecting change

Working With Atomic Design

What You’ll Learn

• Identify the basic design elements that make up your website
• Use these elements to create smart, scalable, maintainable designs
• Convince everyone back at the office to ditch ad-hoc design and embrace a pattern-based workflow
• Unite disparate teams and departments to build designs that deliver a consistent experience across multiple platforms

Cohesive Design Systems for Enterprise

What You’ll Learn

• Inspire designers to unite and share their work
• Unify your design community within your organization
• Illustrate how products relate & work together

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mapping Your Success with Objectives and Key Results

What You’ll Learn

• Commit to bold objectives and key results
• Fine-tune your objectives with wins and fails
• Establish a pace for measuring and tweaking results
• Cascade objectives and key results throughout your organization

Responsive Workflows: Because There’s No Such Thing as a Perfect Process

What You’ll Learn

• Move away from linear thinking
• Embrace a responsive workflow
• Invest in your people

Make Collaboration Happen, Even with Stubborn People

What You’ll Learn

• Embrace 6 collaborative behaviors
• Practice the "4 Virtues of Collaboration"
• Assess your mindset
• Be honest with yourself

Designing with Remote Teams

What You’ll Learn

• Overcome common challenges of remote design
• Focus on communication
• Give your team the means to succeed
• Provide opportunities for people to bond

Designing Stellar Meetings

What You’ll Learn

• Good meeting design fundamentals, tools, and exercises
• Minimize pain points and maximize feelings of empowerment
• The importance of role neutrality in meetings versus the overall design process
• Facilitating movement, ideation, and healthy conversations

Discussing Design: The Art of Critique

What You’ll Learn

• Structure projects to include more feedback loops
• Listen to stakeholder comments with increased objectivity
• Separate problem solving from critical thinking
• Give and receive critiques differently, and for the better

Kicking Off Projects Right

What You’ll Learn

• Put together an effective kickoff workshop.
• Get your team working together quickly with easy facilitator techniques.
• Become a compelling agent of change for your team.
• Beat down the defeatism and fear that comes from traditional kickoff meetings.

A Practical Approach to Better Project Kickoffs

What You’ll Learn

• Make them a critical jumping-off point for your design process
• Know where planning research, like asking the hard questions of your stakeholders can reveal the hopes and fears of your project
• Understand how integrating good facilitation into projects from the start will better manage the dynamics that can derail your process
• Recognize what kickoff meeting tools & techniques are effective at producing actionable outcomes