Summary
Join conference curator Christian Crumlish, the conference speakers, and guest commentators for a lively panel discussion reviewing highlights, sharing notable takeaways, and diving deeper into questions inspired by the afternoon’s presentations.
Key Insights
-
•
Shielding teams too much can stunt their growth; some adversity builds product muscles.
-
•
Being the single filter for all executive requests often leads to burnout and inefficiency.
-
•
Situational factors like company size and team maturity define how much information and context to share.
-
•
Storytelling is a foundational UX and product skill for aligning teams and stakeholders.
-
•
Adapting the level of detail and format of strategy communication is critical for different audiences.
-
•
Risk management requires repeatedly surfacing fears and anxieties to identify what truly matters.
-
•
Translating risks into financial impact is an effective way to engage executives.
-
•
Including cross-functional teams in risk conversations builds shared security and better decisions.
-
•
Having one designer for many PMs is a red flag and leadership failure in staffing design.
-
•
Product and design leaders must decide which battles to fight: evangelize design or focus on delivering product.
Notable Quotes
"When everybody's fully agreeing on things, that tends to make me nervous because it can be groupthink."
"If you put yourself between the C-suite and the product team, you assign yourself a job you have no time for."
"Sometimes you need to slow things down and hit the brakes to prevent rushed, emotion-driven decisions."
"In a startup, I share long-term fringe ideas to help engineers and designers avoid boxing themselves in."
"Storytelling is not process-oriented but is relevant for each team in terms they understand."
"Proto strategy means crafting your strategy from eight pages down to one sentence to adapt communication."
"Have you asked what scares us or keeps us up at night to surface real risks to focus on?"
"A development team of six costs a million bucks a year, so research costs are an investment in avoiding waste."
"One designer to twelve PMs is dead on arrival; that's either design isn't valued or you're massively understaffed."
"You’re not just convincing people of the product’s value but the benefit it brings to them personally."
Dig deeper—ask the Rosenbot:
More Videos
"This Summit is your annual opportunity to get to know each other and amplify the promise and impact of design."
Bria Alexander Louis RosenfeldWelcome
September 8, 2022
"Without drugs people would be sick and without UX it wouldn't be able to use the drugs."
Mike OrenWhy Pharmaceutical's Research Model Should Replace Design Thinking
March 28, 2023
"Technology is often blamed, but many issues come from uneven training, misunderstandings, and poor configurations."
Jodi ForlizziDesign and AI innovation
June 5, 2024
"Working in design ops in 2023 can be overwhelming, so connecting with peers in the community mixer is more important than ever."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
October 3, 2023
"People remember how you made them feel more than what you said."
Michael WeirMixed Methods and Behavioural Science (Videoconference)
May 26, 2023
"Valuable research becomes buried when insight decks flood Slack channels and get lost over time."
Molly FargotsteinMultipurpose Communication & UX Research Marketing (Videoconference)
September 12, 2019
"If we create gaps, that means our space for change is what we want and need to do here in Latin America."
Verónica Urzúa Jorge MontielThe B-side of the Research Impact
March 12, 2021
"Knowledge management and IA help folks find, make sense of, and importantly learn from the content they need."
Husani OakleyTheme Two Intro
June 6, 2023
"This approach gives you a nearly pixel-perfect one-to-one match between design and the compiled app."
George Abraham Stefan IvanovDesign Systems To-Go: Reimagining Developer Handoff, and Introducing App Builder (Part 2)
October 1, 2021
