Software as Material—A Redux
Summary
Building on his seminal Enterprise UX 2016 keynote, Greg Petroff will revisit the meta-trends facing the product development community, and their implications for User Experience practitioners.
Key Insights
-
•
The shift from feature-driven to outcome-focused product development improves alignment and impact in enterprise software.
-
•
AI and generative tools are accelerating design and engineering work, enabling faster prototyping and solution discovery.
-
•
Cross-disciplinary boundaries between design, engineering, and product management are blurring, requiring new collaboration models.
-
•
Domain knowledge is essential for understanding complex enterprise problems but can also create cognitive biases.
-
•
Building strong relationships with cross-functional partners is vital for driving change and shared success.
-
•
Design systems and cloud-native architectures enable velocity and scalability in building modern software.
-
•
Societal issues like climate change and political polarization shape the context and responsibilities of designers.
-
•
The prediction frameworks designers used historically are less effective due to rapid technological and cultural changes.
-
•
Low-code and no-code tools will empower designers to prototype and configure solutions more directly, improving agility.
-
•
Designers must become cultural change agents advocating for growth mindsets and inclusive product cultures to maintain relevance.
Notable Quotes
"People are starting to catch on with the fact that design matters and that it’s maturely important to solving the problems we face."
"The best experiences are the ones that start to be relevant around who we are, recognizing where we are and what we’re trying to accomplish."
"There’s a new tech stack for software creation, all about cloud services and subscription-based business models."
"Prediction frameworks worked until the world changed; now our prior experiences aren’t always helpful for what comes next."
"The code starts to follow the outcomes and might even start to write itself at some level."
"We’re moving toward a contextual enterprise, where everything is relevant and adaptive to the user’s situation."
"We have to be advocates for growth mindset and process improvement because people fall back on old ways even in times of change."
"Take your cross-functional partners out to lunch. Build relationships because people don’t resist change; they resist what they don’t know."
"AI assistance in user research doesn’t supplant humans; it augments and assists by helping us sift through large volumes of data."
"If we deeply understand outcomes and advocate for impact, we’ll be the ones making real change happen in the enterprise."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"I like to engage my stakeholders as co-creators and co-discoverers so their ideas and concerns get reflected in recommendations."
Carl TurnerYou Can Do This: Understand and Solve Organizational Problems to Jumpstart a Dead Project
March 28, 2023
"If you have somebody on your team for three years, for five years, that’s amazing from a longevity perspective given enterprise legacy and complexity."
Karen PascoeDeveloping Experience Teams and Talent in the Enterprise
June 8, 2016
"Sending small care packages to remote team members goes a long way in showing we care and building connection."
Jilanna WilsonDistributed Design Operations Management
October 23, 2019
"Slack channels and weekly meetings encourage cross-contract collaboration, avoiding duplication and sharing learnings across teams."
Shawna Hein Kevin HoffmanCreate a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
November 17, 2022
"Don’t kill grandma is our mantra reminding us the stakes of the tiny design details we face every day."
Barb SpantonDoing Work That Matters: A Look Beyond The Idealistic Notion of 'Doing Meaningful Work'
June 10, 2022
"Our team mission was to accelerate learning and productization of AI and ML technologies in digital imaging."
Briana ThomasThe Quiet Force: Uncovering Hidden Leadership in High-Impact Design Teams
September 24, 2024
"Service design is 10% connecting the dots and 90% creating the conditions that bring those dots closer together."
Gina MendoliaTherapists, Coaches, and Grandmas: Techniques for Service Design in Complex Systems
December 3, 2024
"The era of 100-page reports is ending because we simply can’t produce them fast enough at scale."
Lija Hogan Milan Mijatovic Sam Proulx Louis RosenfeldThree Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
March 15, 2024
"Imagine your current design ops team is like a coin and every time you flip it, it comes up heads, but coins have two sides."
John Calhoun Rachel PosmanTwo Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops
January 8, 2024
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What alternative decision-making structures support more equitable power sharing beyond majority voting?
What are best practices for engaging C-suite executives and physicians as champions for B2B healthcare apps?
In what ways are synthetic users or virtual personas currently used in research practice?