Establishing a Design-Led Culture

As a start-up, the key is to disrupt, differentiate & challenge; but even for well-established companies, the difference between surviving and thriving lies in how well a company can adapt and innovate. Effectively implementing a design-led culture involves constant re-prioritization, collaboration and articulation of a clear road map. Esse will discuss challenges around embedding a design thinking culture, rallying a team to focus on executing a usable design in a viable MVP, and building the skills & mindsets critical to adapting from corporate execution to the Agile development of a start-up.

Hear best practices and potential solutions for typical problems faced for UX teams working in Lean startups and in the financial sector. Get recommendations for building a strong team culture and maximizing outputs when time and money are short. And, gain some inspiration to transform your organization into an innovative and design-led business.

What You'll Learn

• What it means to fit UX in at a start-up environment
• Establishing a design-led, collaborative culture and method of operation
• Optimizing product development through customer insights
• Creating customer empathy across your organization
• Knowing your audience; testing early and regularly
• Overcoming hurdles and barriers of doing UX in a lean start-up
• Prioritizing, tracking and executing UX work according to a strategy
• Building the right team
• Creating a shared vision and continuous engagement
• Making venture design work

Topics Covered

• Uncovering problems in a traditional sector (e.g. the home lending market)
• Startups & UX
• Incorporating UX into daily rhythm
• Defining target audiences
• Establishing a research strategy
• Maximizing research with limited budgets and time
• Building empathy and customer focus
• Prototyping to hypothesize or gain insights to actual customer pain points
• Venture design vs. traditional user-centered design
• Building a UX team on a budget
• Prioritizing, tracking and executing UX activities
• Lessons learned: what we wished we'd known a year ago