We're pleased to announce our full programme, with a roster of 16 expert speakers delivering sessions at the lean event.
the lean event will also feature exclusive, hands-on workshops held the day before the conference on 26th April.
8:30
45 minutes
9:15
15 minutes
9:30
60 minutes
How much should you invest to truly delight your customers? When you focus on removing frustration you end up with a product that just satisfies. Moving past that to delight means changing your whole approach.
Learn how to use the Kano model to help you prune features, locate missed customer expectations, and identify innovative ways to add the value that delights customers. Helping you to build a strategy that solves real problems, not just adds new features.
closeJared M. Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering and a co-founder of Center Centre.
He spends his time working with the research teams at User Interface Engineering, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year.
close10:30
tea/coffee break
11:00
30 minutes
Lean Analytics is the combination of Lean Startup best practices and the use of data to build better startups and products faster.
The goal is to help you understand how to use metrics (along with your gut!), what to track and when.
Ben will cover key topics from the Lean Analytics book including the One Metric That Matters, the 5 stages of a startup (or product) and the Lean Analytics Cycle.
closeBen Yoskovitz is an entrepreneur, angel investor and author. He co-wrote Lean Analytics in 2013 with Alistair Croll, a book designed to help people use data to build companies faster.
Ben has worked at several startups as VP Product, including VarageSale (a venture-backed startup building a community-focused marketplace) and GoInstant, which was acquired by Salesforce.
Ben also co-founded Year One Labs, an early stage startup accelerator that invested in 5 companies, one of which, Localmind, was acquired by Airbnb. Personally, Ben has invested in over 15 companies.
close11:30
30 minutes
A product roadmap is a high-level plan that shows how a product is likely to evolve over time. While a roadmap is a useful tool, applying it in an agile, dynamic context can be challenging:
How can we create a realistic forecast when markets and technologies change frequently and unexpectedly? How can we build a longer-term plan when development teams commit to no more than four weeks? How do the product roadmap and the product backlog relate? This talk answers the questions above and provides practical tips to help you leverage product roadmaps in an agile context.
closeRoman is a leading product management expert specialising in agile and lean practices. He teaches product managers and product owners and helps companies establish an effective product management organisation.
Roman is also the author of Agile Product Management with Scrum; he has created several product management tools; and he writes a popular blog for product people.
close12:00
lunch break
13:00
30 minutes
Of the estimated two million people living with sight loss in the UK, almost half say they would like to leave their home more often. Wayfindr is a pioneering not-for-profit on a mission to empower vision impaired people to navigate the world independently.
We'll take you on a three year journey of continual learning from initial prototypes, through pilot projects at London Underground stations, to the upcoming release of the Wayfindr Open Standard for audio-based wayfinding.
closeUmesh has been working as a designer for over 15 years and is passionate about helping organisations make “inclusive not exclusive” digital products.
He is co-founder & CEO of a non-profit startup called Wayfindr and a senior member of staff at ustwo’s London studio.
close13:30
30 minutes
User research, analytics, hypotheses and experiments: we are focused on gaining understanding through data, validating that our interventions bring about the (user) behaviour we desire. We design systems, the systems we design interact with other systems, and it’s all getting awfully complex. Can we truly understand what’s going on?
In this talk, Johanna will introduce you to core principles of systems thinking, and discuss how they relate to our work as designers of products, services, companies. What methods and tools can we employ to make sense of systems? How do we enable users to form a mental model of a system - and what role are we designing for our users?
Expect to walk away with some systems theory, some practical take-aways, and the insight that the system is always one step ahead of you.
closeJohanna is a product strategist, information architect, and researcher with 11 years experience in UX.
She applies agile and lean thinking to helping clients launch new products, and is dedicated to insights-driven product development.
close14:00
tea/coffee break
14:30
30 minutes
Established companies are under pressure from various quarters to act like more startups. This is mostly because there are now several examples of large companies that have been unexpectedly killed by newer and more nimble entrants into their markets.
But large companies are NOT startups, nor should they aspire to be. The startup way is toolbox of principles and methods that can be applied by any type of organization working on innovation. This talk will outline the five key principles from within that toolbox that are relevant for established companies.
closeTendayi is an author and consultant with a PhD in Psychology and an MBA.
He works as a strategy and innovation consultant to help large organizations develop their innovation capabilities so that they can innovate like startups.
close15:00
30 minutes
How do you scale your effectiveness as a leader? I'll take you on my journey in answering this question. Moving from a culture of top-down management to one of radically devolved teams. Learning new ways to help build autonomous, inclusive teams that are empowered to find their own direction. Allowing you to let go as a leader and be confident that your teams will all go in the right direction.
closeJane is a Glaswegian. She went to London for the summer many years ago and never came back.
Since then she has worked as a UX in The City, in start ups, at agencies, in government at GDS and is now Head of UX at The Telegraph.
She is particularly interested in how design fits works with Agile, with research, and at scale in large organisations.
close15:30
tea/coffee break
16:00
45 minutes
The term Lean has become widely popular, particularly with the word “startup” attached to it. This has led many people to believe this is an approach to work relevant only to new companies or initiatives. Lean-curious companies who have tried to implement these ideals often stall at one or two teams citing organizational complexities, politics and dependencies as insurmountable obstacles to Lean Startup at scale.
Can Lean Startup practices be scaled — not just as culture and philosophy but as tactical process? In this practical presentation, Jeff will share several methods for scaling Lean Startup techniques in large organizations exemplified in detailed case studies and professional experience. Jeff will cover knowledge management, intra-team dependencies, infrastructure requirements and several other elements of ensuring successful Lean Startup practices in companies of any size.
closeWith a 16 year career as an interaction designer, Agile practitioner, user experience team leader and blogger, he is one of the leading voices on the topic of Agile UX and Lean UX.
In addition, Jeff is the author of the O'Reilly book, Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience.
close16:45
after a busy day of sessions, join us for some refreshments and a cold drink.
8:30
60 minutes
9:30
60 minutes
People say Lean methods are not strategic--that they allow you to test your strategic ideas, but do not allow you to set strategy. This is a misunderstanding of both strategy and of lean methods. Strategy is not, as some would hold, a detailed plan that you hand off to execution teams. Rather, it is a set of simple rules that both guide decision-making and at the same time, evolve in response to continuously changing circumstances. This means that in fact, strategy cannot exist without execution.
Lean methods unify idea-generation and idea-execution into a single whole, making them deeply strategic. What’s more, this Lean way of thinking about Strategy cascades—it works at all levels of the organization. In this talk, Josh will show how you can frame a simple, clear strategy of surprising power, and use that strategy to connect each level of your organization around a guiding vision.
closeJosh Seiden is a designer, author, coach, and product leader. He works with startups and large companies to create new digitally-enabled products and services. He is an expert in applying Lean methods to product development and strategy. (He believes that Niels Bohr was correct when he said, "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.")
Josh is the co-author (with Jeff Gothelf) of Lean UX and the forthcoming Sense and Respond, which explores the relationship between Lean teams and the larger organizations in which they work.
close10:30
tea/coffee break
11:00
30 minutes
Metrics are the Devil's Dandruff! The are useful to help refine a product but everyone knows that KPIs lead to misery, pestilence and death. Chris will introduce another approach to implementing metrics in organisations. One that uses metrics and hypotheses to foster collaboration and alignment. Just like dynamite, it would appear that metrics can be used for good as well as evil. It all depends on how you use them.
closeChris Matts has over 10 years of experience in investment banking including strategy work as a practitioner rather than as a consultant.
His specialist areas are real options, IT risk management, business value and agile analysis. He has been working in exotic credit derivatives for the past few years.
close11:30
30 minutes
Experience Maps provide zoomed out view of user journeys, service touchpoints and contextual factors that influence user experience on holistic level. These maps are frequently based on good quality data, user research and business knowledge. Often though, these beautifully crafted maps follow the fate of other UX deliverables: they are hanged on a wall only to collect dust and be forgotten.
In his talk, Jiri will show how he turned experience map from polished deliverable into a living tool that grew with the project, communicated challenges upon a glance, helped the team to share the knowledge and provokes discussions outside of the team.
closeJiri leads UX across Telegraph’s mobile apps. He is responsible for improving the current applications, but also explores crucial questions: what new mobile experiences should the Telegraph Media Group develop? How will these propositions fit into people’s daily lives?
Before joining the Telegraph, Jiri was part of the BBC Research & Development team, where he researched, designed and prototyped new content discovery experiences. Jiri also worked on a range of consumer and corporate products for National Rail Enquiries, Freesat, Canon and American Express.
close12:00
lunch break
13:00
30 minutes
Over the past few years there’s been a push in the product development world to “make products that people love”. A great User Experience is now essential to creating a successful product. While many companies focus on having the best design and the greatest experience, they are still missing the most important step in product development - learning about their customers.
With Agile and Lean gaining popularity in more companies, we talk about techniques to get things out to users faster. At the core of this has been the Minimum Viable Product. Unfortunately, many people still do not understand the MVP. Some see it as a way to release a product faster. Others are scared of it, viewing it as a way to put broken code on your site and ruin products.
The sole purpose of Minimum Viable Product is to learn about your customers. This step that has been so overlooked and yet it is the most essential part to creating a product your customers will love. The more information you can uncover through experimentation, the more certainty there is about building the right thing. In this talk, Melissa will go over how to design the most effective product experimentations and Minimum Viable Products. She’ll explain how to get the rest of the organization on board with this method of testing, and how to incorporate it into overall Product Strategy.
closeMelissa Perri is a product development and process consultant.
An experienced Product Manager and UX Designer from New York City, she is passionate about helping teams find the right processes to make better products.
close13:30
30 minutes
For most teams, the biggest risks to your measuring and learning comes from within. I'm talking about cognitive biases: the mental shortcuts that our brains take everyday to help us cope with millions of bits of information we take in each minute. Cognitive biases helped us avoid being eaten by woolly mammoths - but today they threaten our ability to ruthlessly invalidate and prioritize. I'll walk through common cognitive biases, how to spot them, and how to challenge them.
close14:00
tea/coffee break
14:30
30 minutes
Understanding Lean Startup principles is one thing, applying them whilst working on a product another. The next level is disseminating that knowledge and experience, seeding a Lean Startup mindset in people who are not (yet) working or thinking that way. Through collaborating with large organisations (Pearson, Axa, Société Générale), teaching and training managers and subject matters expert into looking at their work, their products and their business through the refreshing lenses of Lean, I learned about resistance and excitement.
Through my work with Apps for Good and City University London's Widening Participation programme, I embarked into seeding Lean principles and a growth mindset into children and teenager and learned about reserve and curiosity. I will share my experiences, my learnings and my failures with you, in order to encourage you to contribute also to a growth of growth mindsets.
closeSophie is a lean startup, product management, UX and Agile expert, and director of London-based UX consultancy Baguette UX.
Working with product teams all over the world, Sophie's input helps teams find their focus, smooth their dynamics and engage in high performance behaviours and processes.
close15:00
30 minutes
In the world of Government, there's a disconnect between how they seem themselves and the business they are really in. Government sees itself in the business of processing data from forms to execute legislative mandates, with IT as a necessary evil. They’re actually in the business of delivering service mediated by technology. This is not unlike how many commercial businesses that see their IT efforts.
This takes a massive shift in culture. That will come through design. Dana will explore how government is changing, how businesses can learn from what's happening there, and the roles product managers will play in all this.
closeDana Chisnell is a UX research nerd (her words) and an elections geek who has trained thousands of people, including government workers, to test their designs.
But what she really loves is giving design literacy to the world. She’s the lead on a project to develop a series of Field Guides To Ensuring Voter Intent.
The Field Guides, originally funded by a Kickstarter project, are designed to be quick, easy, accessible help for American election officials to do the best possible design.
She won 2 MacArthur grants to expand the Field Guides Series. She wrote Handbook of Usability Testing, Second Edition with Jeff Rubin.
She’s a co-founder of the Center for Civic Design with Whitney Quesenbery, which has loaned her to the United States Digital Service.
close15:30
tea/coffee break
16:00
30 minutes
Every business is now unique in using Lean Startup principles. Experimentation, evidence, and iteration are the new normal.
Done right, it’s a healthy, focused approach. Done poorly, it becomes twisted into absurd scientism: numbers trump all, and users are reduced to mere statistics.
Digital technology’s unprecedented scale brings serious ethical responsibility. How can we balance data-driven approaches with empathy and humanity? How do we help companies see users as more than means to achieve company goals? And how do we ensure our decisions benefit not only ourselves but our wider communities and the world at large?
closeCennydd Bowles is a digital product designer and writer. He has a decade of experience helping companies realise the benefits of good design, most recently as design lead at Twitter.
He writes for A List Apart and is author of the book Undercover User Experience Design.
close16:30
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