From UX to Product
What You’ll Learn
- Define product management and determine why you may want to be a PM
- Map your UX skills to product management
- Examine the other two circles of technology and business
- Collaborate effectively with engineers
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
Small Acts to Shift Big Things: Using Your Voice to Align Organizational Values
What You’ll Learn
- Understand the challenges that each of us face when we try to make change
- Build communication skills to shift conversations around you
- Learn tips for how to speak up and engage in a process
Prioritizing Product Goals
What You’ll Learn
- Recognize common errors in prioritizing features
- Understand the critical difference between outcomes and output
- Be comfortable saying “no” in a rational and transparent way
- Discover Bruce’s method for prioritizing goals based on value, effort, and risk
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
The Experience Is The Product
What You’ll Learn
- Organize your design team to be more effective in an agile environment
- Engage marketing and product design to be on the same team, designing for the user experience
- Evolve product management to focus more on the user experience
Collaborative Design Discovery: Four Essential Techniques
What You’ll Learn
- Create a shared pool of knowledge
- Consider discovery as a mindset and not an artifact
- Embrace critique as an important part of the design process
- Examine three mindsets for designers
Metaphors in Qualitative Research & Analysis: The Force is Strong
What You’ll Learn
- Use games and tricks to identify the important metaphors within a qualitative dataset, particularly ones that surface hypotheses you can test
- Invite stakeholders who may be focused on quantitative research to see the power of the qualitative side of things
- Turn information into useful data by using spreadsheet programs to tackle big qualitative datasets
- Gain deep insights when you categorize and cluster information more rigorously
So… what do I make? Exploring the World of Modern UX Design
What You’ll Learn
- Try out new kinds of design deliverables
- Work faster and more efficiently through design
- Learn how to collaborate more closely
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
Creating a Virtuous Cycle: The Research and Design Feedback Loop
What You’ll Learn
- Turn research results into design actions
- Make your organization listen to research
- Design your research to answer the right questions
Strategic Storytelling
What You’ll Learn
- Construct compelling narratives
- Communicate the heart of the matter
Mapping Experiences: It’s the Destination and the Journey
What You’ll Learn
- Initiate The Effort
- Draw the Diagram
- Align and Envision
- Test and Experiment
Good to Great
From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.
Lots of product teams have progressed substantially over the past several years from very weak/novice to generally capable/competent. The dialog has moved from “why can’t we have a product designer or user researcher on our team?” to “why is it that our product manager and product designer are not always working together effectively?” and “why is it that the user research is being largely ignored when they have such seemingly valuable findings?”
This is actually progress, and we can see the improvements in the results, but in the commercial product world, it’s not sufficient to just have mediocre products, at least not for long. Our products have to provide substantial value over and above the alternatives. In this presentation, Inspired author Marty Cagan will focus on raising the game of product managers, product designers and user researchers. He will highlight several of the top issues/problems for these roles, and discuss how you can address each.
Planning Your User’s Path Together
From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.
Product teams spend a lot of time making decisions about what the customer will experience. UX Designers make journey maps and interfaces. Product Managers build and prioritize roadmaps. Marketing writes copy and gets in front of potential users. Engineers make it all into a product. All too frequently, we do these things separately, which can lead to problems. Engineering doesn’t understand the ideal user flow. Designers don’t know why one feature is being built before a more important one. Marketing has a different vision of the ideal customer. And Product Managers have to run around explaining the vision to everybody on the team.
Some things are so important that they need to be created, shared, and understood by the whole team together. The User Lifecycle Funnel is one of those things. In this talk, Laura Klein, author of the forthcoming Build Better Products, will share a framework and a design thinking exercise for making sure that everyone on your team—including Product Managers and UX Designers—is united in their vision for just what exactly it is that you’re building. You’ll learn a quick, hands-on tool that will help you combine qualitative and quantitative data to determine and measure every step of your customer’s journey.
There is No Such Thing as UX Strategy. There is Only Product Strategy.
From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.
UX strategy is part of product strategy. It is not its own thing. Calling it out as such further isolates designers from their colleagues in “the business” and in Product Management. It does nothing to actually drive the value of a holistic user experience into the org’s mainstream conversations. Instead, designers should work closely with Product Managers to inform a product strategy conversation that considers not only the UX but the business’ and product’s success factors as well.
In this talk, Jeff Gothelf—co-author of Lean UX and the forthcoming Sense and Respond—will teach you:
- Why carving out a separate “UX” strategy is detrimental to team and product cohesion
- How collaboration between product managers and ux designers can help frame a holistic product strategy
- How to divide strategic responsibilities between product managers and ux designers so that everyone has their seat at the table
Curing Shiny Object Syndrome: Prioritization Best Practices
What You’ll Learn
- How to bring disparate stakeholders together under a common framework
- How to move past opinion, emotion, and personal agendas to set smart business goals
- How to separate the merely good ideas from the truly great ones
- How focusing on your goals and achieving success can transform your stakeholders into your biggest cheerleaders
Boosting Research and Design Adoption
What You’ll Learn
- How to identify your organization's decision-style archetype
- How hidden values drive decision making in your organization
- How to use those values to develop more effective project plans
- How to share your progress and results in ways that boost buy-in from stakeholders
Designing Remotely
What You’ll Learn
- Strategize for people and their contexts
- Spend time designing your digitally defined workplace
- Rethink process
- Manage outcomes
Navigate Product Roadmap Roadblocks: The Dirty Dozen
What You’ll Learn
- Focus on benefits versus features
- Listen for unsolved problems
- Inspire confidence and innovation
- Make decisions based on your strategic goals
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.
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