Most of the services we use every day aren’t designed to meet our needs

In fact, most of the services we use every day weren’t designed at all.

Design is an increasingly mainstream activity inside even our most traditional organisations, yet the services we use today are still more likely to be the product of technological constraints, political whim or personal taste than they are the conscious decisions of an individual or organisation.

Why are businesses still failing to deliver services that work for users?

The answer lies in our ability to see services as things to be designed in the first place and with it out role and realisability as a service provider.

Lou will talk about the experience of building the UK’s largest in house design teams in the UK government, and what it takes to build a truly user-centred organisation at scale.

Developing new products and ideas is said to be done best with everyone in a room – the proverbial “garage.” How do you make sure ideas are seen, heard, and built on? What will happen to our creative output in a remote world? How can we design tools that enhance human creativity?

Georg Petschnigg, Chief Innovation Officer from WeTransfer, will draw from his extensive experiences building award winning products used by millions around the world to share how we can better enhance creativity and team collaboration in the current climate.

As the world went into lockdown, the commerce went online in a matter of days. The shift has forced thousands of businesses and their customers to change their habits and adopt new ones. Shopify, and especially their product team, has been at the center of this transformation. In this session you will hear how Shopify’s product team responded to the unfolding events and how their thinking about their products and their workflows has evolved since then.

Product teams are diverse and dedicated groups of developers, designers and managers that work closely together. Like most other teams, they now have to adapt to new ways of collaborating. How can they build trust and good communication for effective product innovation workflows fully remotely?

When everything in the world changes, does your product strategy have to? No. You double down on it. Tatyana Mamut, PhD, Chief Product Officer at Nextdoor, shares the two company values that should always guide your product decisions, empowering you to act quickly while remaining true to your customers and your company vision. She’ll discuss the different ways Nextdoor’s product team responded to neighbors in need during the pandemic, plus share research and tips all purpose-driven companies need to hear.

Now more than ever we rely on tech businesses and their products to support our personal and social lives. While some celebrate this accelerating adoption, others warn of the ever-increasing influence of the Big Tech. Behind every tech product there are decisions made by designers, managers and engineers. What role do these professionals play in shaping the future of the online community? What should be their guiding principles for a more sustainable internet?