Product Management is the glue holding together products and services as they are being conceived of and built. Until now, product management was generally an engineering activity or a marketing role in a large corporation. In marketing, product management was called brand management and was heavily influenced by what competitors were doing. Brand managers studied massive amounts of quantitative pricing, sales, and trend data in order to make small shifts to soft goods or consumables. Their impact was derived from maximising value from small market positioning shifts. In more engineering-centric corporations, like big software companies, product managers learned to gather requirements from stakeholders, mix them together into a series of features, and work with developers to launch software. Their role was heavily focused on developing software with a large breadth of features and functions that could be viewed as competitive.

Being a UX person on an Agile project can really suck, and for lots of reasons. While the UX people work hard to think holistically about their users’ product experience, Agile developers are working hard to break things down into tiny buildable parts. User Story Mapping is a simple UX-centric approach for understanding your product or feature idea from a whole UX perspective while still breaking down the product into small backlog items.

Responsive design is fluid grids, flexible images, media queries—and much more. Organisations that have been through large-scale responsive redesigns know that the specific implementation techniques are the least of their problems. Stakeholders need to be convinced to participate in a different kind of prototyping and review process. Working with responsive “Lego pieces” made from content components and design patterns means that teams must give up the familiar page metaphor. Content management and digital asset management systems and processes often change. And teams need to change their design, review, and QA processes to account for a much wider range of devices and form factors.

UX pros everywhere say it: “The culture here makes it so hard to deliver a great experience!” The organisation’s behavioural norms and values are often part of the problem; we’ll never get very far in an organisation that fundamentally doesn’t value user experience. Sometimes, though, we simply trip over our own inability to recognise and adapt to the culture. This half-day workshop will focus on how to be more effective within the culture we’re stuck with…and when and how we can encourage change.

Please bring a laptop with you

In this 3 hour immersive product design session, you’ll learn the principles at the heart of Google’s Material design language from the diverse user experience team that made it possible. Whether you’re a visual designer or like to be creative with code, during this fast paced workshop you’ll receive direct mentorship as you collaborate with your peers on tandem disciplinary tracks. Choose between a focus of interaction design, visual design, motion design, or UX engineering as we explore the methodology behind creating products that are both usable and delightful.

Due to the complex format of the event and the attendance limit, Google ask that those who have a disciplinary focus in either Interaction Design, Visual Design, Motion Design, or UX Engineering participate.

This hands on workshop will dig into cxpartners’ innovation toolbox to show how you can move beyond minimum viable product to minimal viable experience - and deliver delight to customers.