Summary
Teams Work How People Work You’re part of a cross-functional team dedicated to creating an amazing product experience. You’re an essential piece of a larger puzzle. But how does your piece mesh with all the others? This first-of-its-kind interactive session will blend improvisation, audience participation, panel-style discussion, and more to explore the inner dynamics of cross-functional enterprise teams. We’ll illustrate a few best (and probably a few worst) practices, and you’ll walk away with a new found understanding for your colleagues and a renewed sense of ways to make the fit between your different roles clearer and more effective. Participating in this session: - Christian Crumlish, Head of Product, 7 Cups - Jacqui Frey, Director of Design Operations, MailChimp - Kristina Halvorson, Founder, CEO, Brain Traffic - Jamie Janssen, Research Manager for Shared Rides, Uber Technologies, Inc - Ramya Mahalingam, Associate Design Director, McKinsey & Company - Adam Penly, Lead Frontend Architect, Capital One
Key Insights
-
•
Christian Krumbles highlights that product management often leans heavily on business expertise but must balance with design and engineering.
-
•
Ramya Mahalindam explains that design teams are frequently understaffed, limiting time for prototyping and final polish.
-
•
Jackie describes project management as an interdependent ecosystem connecting vision and execution, often spread across functions.
-
•
Adam notes engineers excel at execution but often lack deep connection to user experience, creating a gap to bridge.
-
•
Jamie Jansen shares the importance of specialized researchers (e.g., dog behaviorists) to authentically understand unique users.
-
•
Christina Halverson reveals that content is often decentralized and inconsistent across teams, requiring leadership to empower better practice.
-
•
Workshop sessions are valuable to align assumptions and give partners a voice, improving collaboration and product outcomes.
-
•
Product, design, and engineering often experience tension between quick feature delivery and the need for research- and user-driven iteration.
-
•
Directors struggle with balancing centralized and distributed teams, causing ambiguity in leadership and goals across products.
-
•
The Invocation improv game helps cross-disciplinary teams discover deeper shared meaning and empathy beyond daily work tasks.
Notable Quotes
"Product management can lean into the business comfort zone, but great product balances design, tech, and business - Christian Krumbles."
"Designers want to prototype more but just don’t have the time or team capacity - Ramya Mahalindam."
"Project management is about connecting everyone around a shared vision and delivering branded tech with creative constraints - Jackie."
"Engineers are good at executing strategy but need better connectivity to UX to be fully part of the process - Adam."
"Some people misunderstand or misrepresent our end user—the dog—and we have to bridge that gap carefully - Jamie Jansen."
"Content is being produced all over the place with no cohesion; leadership needs to recognize content as the fuel of experience - Christina Halverson."
"Sometimes product managers want research to just check boxes, but to evolve, we need to learn, not just validate - Angelica Moreno."
"Designers are creative, but product managers help ground decisions with constraints and requirements - Peter Burstner."
"Everything is about compromise and sometimes disagreeing to disagree, building half one idea and half the other - Christian Krumbles."
"Our invocation game helps us see the product as community, connection, and a voice for the unspoken - panel consensus."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If designers spend more time talking about titles than their work, we’re just gazing into our navels."
Adam Cutler Karen Pascoe Ian Swinson Susan WorthmanDiscussion
June 8, 2016
"If you’re doing a lot of work that’s not in your job description, you might actually be doing leadership."
Peter MerholzThe Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX (Videoconference)
July 13, 2023
"Governance is about decision making, not workflow processes."
Lisa WelchmanCleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
June 14, 2018
"Green spaces in cities can greatly enhance our quality of life and resilience."
Vincent BrathwaiteOpener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams
October 22, 2020
"Psychological safety was far and away the key ingredient for teams being effective."
Brenna FallonLearning Over Outcomes
October 24, 2019
"Working from home during the pandemic is hard because it’s fun only when you can actually leave your home."
Tricia WangSpatial Collapse: Designing for Emergent Culture
January 8, 2024
"Diverging and converging around the business model canvas helped us test and prototype delivery methods for the value propositions."
Edgar Anzaldua MorenoUsing Research to Determine Unique Value Proposition
March 11, 2021
"Our brains are terrible at operating only on one type of information, whether object-oriented or context-oriented."
Designing Systems at Scale
November 7, 2018
"If my experiment made front-page news tomorrow, what would the headline be? Would my mother be proud?"
Erin WeigelGet Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact
July 24, 2024
