Something a little bit different. There’s a great exercise for conference speakers (or anyone else) to practice their craft - Presentation Karaoke.

Wikipedia describes presentation karaoke as “an improvisational activity in which a participant must deliver a presentation based on a set of slides that they have never seen before.” What it doesn’t say is that it is absolutely hilarious and fun to play. I describe it as; 1 minute, random topic, random slides — GO!

You can step up and give it a try, or sit back and watch. Either way, you will not forget this!

Got a burning question you want an answer to and didn’t quite get it addressed during the day?

This fishbowl-style conversation brings a select group of the day’s speakers and other invited Industry leaders to the stage to answer your questions about how to sustain innovation at scale. This is your opportunity to explore vexing questions about design innovation with our panelists.

Here’s how it works:

• You submit your questions to our volunteers during the conference.
• We'll curate and short-list a few questions
• Each question will be asked to the panelists and then discussed for 5 minutes.
• After that, the audience votes on whether to continue the conversation for a few more minutes or move on.

This is a session where you are in control. Also, this will be run as a fishbowl, which means anyone from the audience can join the panel if they want to contribute.

Come ready to ask hard questions and get practical, actionable answers to your toughest questions.

Many of the positive changes we will make with our teams will start with one person's insight. Don't leave that inspiration to chance. Set yourself up to make that insight more likely and learn what to do when you have it that will help you help your team grow.

It all begins with ourselves. More than we would like to believe, people tend to seek stability. How do we create the right environment within ourselves to be open to change, to realize there is room for improvement? How do we do this in a way that our primitive brain doesn't find threatening? In order to become the catalyst, we first need to create an environment in which we can do the same thing to ourselves. That is much harder than it sounds. Being able to do so requires the right mindset, but how do you develop it? How do you recognize that it is needed? How do you open yourself up to change, embrace it, and incorporate experimentation into your own practice?

Having insight is not enough. While an insight might start with one person, change is a team activity. Once you recognize an opportunity, how do you share your insight with your team in a way that will be embraced instead of rejected? Do you understand the biases and fears that might cause resistance to your idea? Just as importantly, how do you time your proposals so that they have the highest likelihood of success?

In this talk, I will talk about 6 things that are necessary for you to do to create the conditions where change is possible. I'll share anecdotes from my own experience promoting change within startups, agencies, and big companies. Drawn from diverse sources, such as BJ Fogg, Carol Dweck, Jocko Willink, and Ray Dalio, these 6 characteristics will help you effect change effectively.

"Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it." ― Jeanne Gang

You are surrounded by smart people, but are you really getting the most from that brilliance when it comes to creative ways to solve problems in your products?

Design Studio is a structured technique that involves many people coming up with prototype solutions to a single problem at once. It will help generate new ideas and share a nuanced understanding among your team about the problem you are solving and who you are solving it for. Better yet, it doesn't require much facilitation skill or prep.

I have used this technique to help teams increase their understanding of the problem, visualize the needs they were requesting, quickly experiment with new ideas, and provide detailed input to the design process. Often, the sketch (or a photo of it) acts as the deliverable for simple problems, eliminating the need for more formal wireframes.

This interactive workshop will give you a brief overview of the Design Studio tool and then guide you through an immersive and collaborative experience on how it works. By the end, you will be able to speak about the benefits of the technique as well as run it with your own teams.

This technique is accessible to everyone. You don’t need any special software and anyone on the team can use it.

Once upon a time, we had ‘Discovery’, ‘Define’, and ‘Design’. These phases let us explore the problem and the audience, while conceiving a holistic solution. Now we have sprints, complete with a backlog that seems like it appears overnight and a development team that is going to build with or without design to guide it. How do we continue to create great products?

Introducing the Fast Foundation Workshop. This 1-day workshop enables you to engage your clients and stakeholders to quickly define the key elements of your product or project, aligns the team, and identifies critical risks. When it is complete, everyone has a good idea of what is going to be built as well as what it will take to get there. It has been tested with companies of all sizes, from founders looking to conceptualize their first product, to large companies redesigning existing products, as well as across verticals. Its general enough to be used in a wide variety of circumstances while specific enough to ensure that you get specific, usable results.

The Fast Foundation Workshop consists of 4 exercises, each one designed to pivot the team’s perspective on the product, while drilling down to greater levels of detail. Each stage of the Fast Foundation Workshop balances democratic content generation with collaborative consensus. You may be familiar with some of the individual exercises, but the magic is in how each is conducted and in how they fit together. The workshop starts with establishing clear goals & priorities, then moves to defining possible users of the product. Next, we shift to a task perspective, mapping the activities those user will need to accomplish to meet the goals, before visualizing key areas of the solution. When these four areas are clear, everyone involved will have a shared understanding of the vision as well as have a clear way to identify risks and mitigate them.

This workshop will introduce leaders of any kind, from product owners and scrum masters, to UX and development leads, to each of the exercises, show how they fit together, give you some tips on how to facilitate them with your team, and enable you to experience the whole process via a demo project. With this experience, you will be prepared to run a Fast Foundation workshop with your own team.

"This meeting is a waste of my time."

When was the last time you had that thought? Was it because the conversation wasn't focused, or people couldn't agree, or maybe they were in violent agreement, but couldn't see it? How easily do you think you can get this meeting back on track? In this session, you will learn a skill that you can apply on the spot that will help you focus the conversation and drive to consensus. Everything you need is probably already in the room.

This technique is specifically for conversations around the features, functions, and behaviors of your product. Most people are visual thinkers, so give them something visual to focus on. You can do that by walking up to the whiteboard and drawing out what people are talking about. By visually capturing the conversation in a public way, you will help all participants understand each other and come to consensus faster. But I can't draw, you say. Neither can I, and I’ve been successfully using this technique for over 15 years. If you can draw a straight-ish line and a box, you have all the drawing skills necessary.

In this engaging workshop, you will learn how to create a basic sketch of an interface using some simple sketching techniques and UX principles as well as practice thinking-on-your-feet that will help you comfortably do this with a group.

I have used this technique to help teams focus the conversation, visualize the requirements they were requesting, quickly experiment with new ideas, and provide detailed input that I can use to design the outcome. Often, the sketch (or a photo of it) acts as the deliverable for simple problems, eliminating the need for more formal wireframes. This technique is accessible to everyone. You don’t need any special software and anyone on the team can use it. Pick up the pen and get on track again.