RebelCon inspires audience to incorporate Human-Centred Design approach
Last June 22nd, I had the chance to go to the RebelCon 2018 event, in Cork, for a full day of lectures by experts from around the world. I was there as Mobacar’s UXer among about 300 other professionals from the software industry, eager to learn more and exchange knowledge on the latest technology, as well as cultural and development practices in this field.
The Keynote by Melissa Perri, CEO of ProductLabs, opened the day. She talked about her experience as Product Manager struggling to build the perfect digital products by shipping feature after feature without effective results. After many tough experiences, she realised that an extremely important part of her projects was missing: understanding the users and their needs.
What she learnt and shared with the audience was: when you validate if what you are building is what customers truly want and need, it helps Product Management to be much more effective.
Melissa also highlighted that, adding to the importance of using methodologies to understand the customer, it is crucial to have a good strategy framework which allows the team to make decisions, besides using the right process and tools at the right time.
The risk, according to her, is when companies fall into a dangerous place called ‘The Build Trap”, the topic of a book that she might launch this year:
The “Build Trap” is this scary place where we fall into the old habit of just building, building, building and shipping software, measuring our success by how many features who get out there, and only trying to optimise for that. You see that with teams that are going to agile and get very excited about velocity, about “how many story points can we ship”, about “how many features can we add to the backlog”. What they are doing is really optimising for outputs instead of outcomes. So to escape the Build Trap, we really have to go back to the core of “why are we even building this?”
After the Keynote, we had the round of talks. Check below the ones I chose to attend:
LECTURE 1 — Helping Communities and Products Thrive by Fostering Empathy (with Sasha Romijn)
In her touching lecture, Sash Romijn brought the importance of Empathy as a fundamental part of human interaction and, consequently, the way we collaborate and work together.
Through examples and her own experience as a trans woman, she invited the audience to reflect on why we sometimes have such difficulty to understand others and the importance of creating a happy and supportive work environment.
She highlighted that embracing diversity and expanding our understanding of other people’s worlds helps us to create both products and communities which work well not only for ourselves, but for all human beings:
“As creators in tech we have such tremendous power to create change, but merely our best intentions will not be enough for that. Understanding other people’s situations, experiences and emotions, which can be dramatically different to ours, helps us to empathise with those that we more easily forget about”
LECTURE 2 — Google Ventures Design Sprint (with Rohan Perera)
How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 Days? Rohan Perera is an advocate of Jake Knapp’s (Author of SPRINT, How to SOLVE Big Problems and TEST New Ideas in Just FIVE Days) Sprint process. Rohan attended Jake’s first two workshops in Bologna and Berlin, and showed us not only how it was to learn the Design Sprint methodology, but also a few tips on how to implement the methodology to your company.
He defends the idea of reducing the Design Sprints in 4 days and guarantees that it is totally possible. In order to make this intensive process work, it is important to have a variety of professionals and decision makers working together as a team, and be committed to it.
Day 1
- Define Challenge
- Produce Solutions
Day 2
- Make Decision
- Create Storyboard
Day 3
- Prototype
- Confirm Testers
Day 4
- User Testing
- Collecting Feedback
Perera has admitted that finding testers might be a challenge for this process, for this reason, he suggests having a good tester database which can help you quickly contact them and schedule a test.
To close the lecture, he showed how different companies such Slack and Savioke have being using the Design Sprint process to validate ideas quickly. You can read the article "How Savioke Built A Robot Personality In 5 Days" on FastCompany to know more about this innovative case.
LECTURE 3— Welcome Failure! Easier Than Done! (with Sabine Wojcieszak, from Gentnextit)
In the agile world we find a lot of slogans around the topic of failure: “Welcome failure”, “fail fast”, “Fail early” or “Fail often” are used regularly. And in theory we all agree that we can learn from failure. What Sabine Wojcieszak suggested on her lecture is that “Welcome Failure” only works when the culture is supportive enough to let the team fail and learn: “There are still managers who believe that “punishing” is the only way to make people learn for the future. And yes, people learn: to hide failure”, she explains.
Sabine has suggested closing the gap between our theoretical understanding of how to deal with failures and the daily workings of the company by analysing the culture, mindset, leadership and discipline, letting the audience re-think our own behavior.
LECTURE 4— Frenemies: Strategies for UX and Product Management Alignment (with Tristan O’Gorman, from IMB)
In his lecture, Tristan O’Gorman shared his experience on aligning Product Management and UX goals working during IBM’s reinvention to a design-oriented, cloud and cognitive solution company.
“Product Management and UX ought to have shared goals, right? Both disciplines essentially seek to build software to help customers drive business outcomes. The reality is, however, that alignment between both roles is not always complete, especially in the white heat of agile development”.
This can happen for various reasons, according to him, and in his talk he showed how to identify the major problems that can cause misalignment, and strategies for dealing with them as they arise, or to help avoid them entirely by implementing Design Thinking methodology in an Agile environment.
The suggestion is to rethink teamwork by focusing on the User Outcomes, with a diverse and empowered team to work with a creative problem solving approach: “teams own the problems and the solution”.
LECTURE 5— How to Win at Product Analytics (with Noel Tate, from Hubspot)
Head of Product for Marketplaces, Noel Tate has 14 years of experience in customer support and product management for companies such as Paddypower, Zendesk, Daft.ie. After all these years, Noel admits that he best ally was analytics tools. “By analysing the data analytics you can make better and wiser decisions”, he summarises. However, to get the best of it, as he has pointed out, it is important to create an analytics culture within your company.
“This culture will give every team greater insight so everyone can ultimately build better products and offer a better service”
Noel defends the idea that, although it is important to have one person or one team responsible for the Analytic platform, it is crucial that everyone in the company has access to it. “All departments and roles in the company can benefit from the analytics”, he says.
It is also important to encourage everyone to get the best from the analytics:
“Share useful information and insights with everyone, it doesn’t need to be a complex presentation, quick insights can be shared on slack, email, or even during a quick coffee”
LECTURE 16— Ryanair’s Agile Journey (with Jerry O’Sullivan, from Ryanair Labs)
In the last lecture, Jerry O’Sullivan introduced the audience to the Ryanair Labs and how the company has been changing to be more agile, improve results, cut costs, and focus on technology and customers.
O’Sullivan admitted that adding UX into the process is still a challenge and the teams have been struggling with it, as they believe that UX slows down the process. His statement generated a certain controversy among the audience which didn’t understand very well how it is possible to be focused on the customer without a strong UX mind-set. O’Sullivan agreed that incorporating UX, although is challenging, should be their next focus.
CONCLUSION
For me, personally, as a UXer it was interesting to start the day listening to lectures about the importance of building products and services focused on customers and see how hard it might be for a few companies to add UX or any Human-Centric Design methodologies into the development process.
I left the event proud of working for a company such as Mobacar.com which has incorporated UX as part of our Agile and data-driven teams, in a supportive environment which truly embraces diversity and is eager to keep learning and improving through new methodologies and knowledge. No doubt a truly inspiring company. ❤
