Cross-functional product design and development – Building a Culture of Innovation. October 22-23 2014

Many companies today are adopting Agile for their engineering teams. Yet many teams still struggle to integrate product and UX design into these new Agile engineering practices relying on hybrid ”Agilefall” style processes with design happening a sprint or two ahead of engineering. As the world of software becomes more continuous, new delivery capabilities like continuous deployment and integration provide us with an unprecedented feedback loop. Every time we launch software we can take advantage of this continuous learning cycle to understand who is using our products and services, what they’re doing with them and how we’re meeting their expectations and our business goals. Combined with techniques born out of user experience and design, we have an unprecedented opportunity to collapse the waterfall, staff truly cross-functional teams working simultaneously on the same business problems and build products that meet customer needs while helping our businesses win.

Jeff is a designer, product strategist, team leader and author. He’s been teaching teams all over the world to rave reviews. Jeff has been creating software products for over 15 years with companies like AOL, Fidelity, WebTrends & TheLadders. Today Jeff is a Principal in Neo’s NYC office.

Every attendee of the workshop gets a free copy of Jeff’s book. Read more about the book here >

Read Jeff’s blog here: www.jeffgothelf.com

See what he has to say on Twitter: @jboogie

• Designers (UX, visual, content, IA, IxD, etc), developers, product managers, stakeholders and team leaders.
• This new continuous reality empowers cross-functional organizations to fundamentally changes the way they discover, create and design new products and services. The old waterfall ways of software development are dead. The new way is a collaborative, continuous cycle of concepting, experimenting, delivering, learning and iterating.
• The only way to truly harness the benefits of this new reality is in a cross-functional team that bases its decisions on evidence from the market gained through experimentation and hypothesis. Teams work together on the same stories at the same time to build shared understanding and incrementally move all disciplines forward towards the project’s goals.
• Jeff Gothelf is an expert in teaching teams how to work in this collaborative fashion and has captured these ideas in his book, Lean UX: Applying lean methods to improve user experience.

In this fun, high-energy and hands-on workshop, Jeff will teach you and your teams:

• How adopting Lean principles exponentially increases the amount your team learns
• How continuous learning does away with the idea of needing to be a ”sprint ahead”
• How basing your product ideas on assumptions, rather than requirements, gets you to faster product/market fit
• Why focusing on achieving outcomes is far more successful than focusing on features
• How to determine the value of your idea before investing deeply
• How to write hypotheses based on our assumptions
• How to structure experiments to test those hypotheses and take advantage of our continuous reality
• How to work cross-functionally to bring engineering, design and product management together in a parallel, agile way
• Why collaborative discovery and research are the best sources of information and shared understanding
• How to incorporate this culture of learning in your organization – enterprise, mid-size or startup
• How to create products that stand a much higher likelihood of success
• How to build a culture of innovation