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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?