How many 1:1’s have you had where you have asked one of your reports about their long-term career goals only to get radio silence? In this interactive session I’ll share how I set up a career development program that is easy to roll out within your teams.

Influencing product and business stakeholders is commonly stated as the #1 issue facing design teams. We’ll talk about how the Yelp consumer design team went from doing what their PM partners told them, to truly partnering and having influence on their roadmaps — and in the process, dramatically improving the product for users.

Most founders start a company for the same reason — they want to solve a problem. However, as the company scales, metrics become important and we start to lose sight of our user goals and start chasing numbers. This talk discusses ways product and design leaders can find a healthy balance between creating value for their users whilst achieving business goals.

Workshops are one of the most misused tools in a designers toolkit — resulting in a bad reputation for wasting time and unclear outcomes. In this talk I cover techniques from Google Ventures that workshop facilitators can use to make sure their workshops are efficient, fun and most importantly — that they produce valuable outcomes.

Feeling like you are undeserving or not skilled enough for your position is a feeling that both new and established designers struggle with. In this interactive talk we discuss what imposter syndrome is, how it can impact your work, and strategies to manage it throughout your career.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney feel like they exploded overnight and it can be hard to tell how much attention we need to pay to these tools. This talk will cover some predictions for the future for how AI will affect our roles as product designers, and what you should be doing now to prepare.