UX Brighton 2022 UX & Product Management

Slides for Avoiding the Agency Trap

Building a product can help your business scale to incredible heights, but too many teams get stuck in what Janna Bastow calls the Agency Trap. In this talk, she’ll share signs you’re veering into this trap, and actionable guides on how to get out and stay out!

Slides for Arrogance & Confidence in Design…Redux

Ten years ago Jonty gave a talk that changed his life. Now he revisits some of those lines of enquiry that upended his career (in a good way). With the benefit of hindsight, some spectacular mistakes, and a decade of experience scaling businesses and teams, what does Arrogance and Confidence look like in 2022?

Slides for T-shaped skills save lives (and products)

Product development requires the work of lots of different people with different skills to deliver their best efforts. So it’s natural we want to be the best at what we do. When those people work in silos and can’t share ideas or communicate, products suffer. Creating ‘t-shaped’ skill sets, with deep knowledge of your own field and insight into those around you, can help.

Using examples from the NHS, where multidisciplinary team working is critical to patient outcomes and supported by a culture of lateral learning and knowledge sharing, Louise looks at the benefits of knowing a little about a lot for product outcomes, team working and your own career, and shares a few surprising outcomes from her own ‘t-shaped’ approach to learning new skills.

Slides for Speaking the same language

It sometimes feels like design and product are talking a different language – both striving to get great products out to their customers, but frequently misunderstanding each other on the path to get there. Kate will share the times she’s seen this happen and the ways she’s tackled it so that you can get ahead and create brilliant working partnerships with your product counterparts.

Slides for Is UX Strategy even a thing?

We hear a lot about UX strategy but what is it and how does it differ from business or product strategy? Do you need it, and how do you go about getting it? That’s a lot of questions to cover in twenty minutes, but Alison will make a start by calling on her experience of helping companies think more carefully (and strategically) about their customers.

Slides for Trade-offs

Product development requires trade-offs, but just like a deal with the devil, the devil is in the details of how you make those trade-offs. And your choices can be devilishly hard. This demonic themed talk looks at various techniques for easing the burden of the bargains you make.

Slides for Leading culture change to increase customer centricity

Digital disruptors and the covid crisis have highlighted the importance of customer centricity. Business leaders clearly recognise their organisations need to be more customer centric and future proof them against ever-changing customer expectations, volatile economic conditions and aggressive digital disruptors.
Business leaders want to understand how to lead culture change to be more customer centric, how to implement new ways of working and how technology can enable their strategy.
Jonathan will talk about leading culture change to increase customer centricity, innovation and agility:

• Working backwards from customers
• Implications for operating models to empower small cross-functional teams.
• How companies like Amazon, Cisco and others reinforce and change their culture.

Jonathan’s objective is to help leaders understand their critical role increasing the focus on customer centricity. Email Jonathan

Slides for YOU DON’T “GET” ANYONE TO DO ANYTHING

“How do we get product managers to value user research?”

“How do we get executives to think in an Agile way?”

“How do we get UX researchers to prioritize our work?”

“How do we get our sales team to stop making promises we can’t deliver?”

For the last twelve years, I have heard these questions on a weekly basis. And the answer to all of them is exactly the same: you don’t “get” anyone to do anything. In this talk, product leader and author of Product Management in Practice Matt LeMay shares his experience working across product, UX, marketing, and leadership teams at companies like Google, Audible, Mailchimp, and Spotify. You’ll learn how the path to success in cross-functional product development means embracing ego death and recognizing that you have very little direct control over anyone or anything. No, seriously.