Talks
17 November 2023
UX Camp Unconference - Melbourne
Theme: ambiguity and uncertainty in the UX discipline
This keynote talk opened the inaugural UX Camp unconference in Melbourne. The talk addressed three key themes that have been causing grief in the UX community over the past three years: the growth of product management; the recent job redundancies; and the rise of Generative AI. The talk helped to inspire the audience to continue pursuing a career in UX and ride the uncertainties and ambiguity that come with these themes.
26 October 2023
Web Directions Summit
Theme: Design System inside an enterprise
This is a revised version of my talk from UX London 2022, discussing the challenges and approaches in establishing and adapting a design system inside a complex enterprise organisation.
18 May 2023
Leading The Product - Sydney
Theme: Helping Product Managers conduct research
Close to 1000 Product Professionals (mostly Product Managers) attended the annual Leading The Product Conference in Sydney. I was given the honour of responding to one of their gnarly problems. My talk highlighted the main cause behind Product Managers not having enough time to get closer to their users and customers and introduced an easy-to-follow end-to-end user research canvas to help them and their product squads plan and conduct research more effectively.
23 March 2023
Product Anonymous Meetup
Theme: Design Leadership and Scaling Design
This is a revised and extended version of my talk from May 2022, where I talk about strategies to help product teams and organisations to raise their design maturity.
24 February 2023
Design Outlook Design Leadership Summit
Theme: Our Strategic Imperative
Over 60 digital design leaders from across Australia gathered together to talk about three key themes. One such theme was our Strategic Imperative. I opened the summit by providing my perspective on our strategic role within our organisations and posed some questions for the attendees to discuss and unpack over an hour.
I then wrote a summary blog of my takeaways of the event.
30 June 2022
UX London 2022
Theme: Design Systems
20 years of building software, not to mention many mergers and acquisitions have led to different tech stacks, theming solutions, look & feel and experiences at Iress. How do you align 20+ years of different user interfaces at Iress towards a single design system?
In this talk I covered:
Humble beginnings with pattern libraries
Current state of the Iress Design System
Iress’ future vision towards Design System as a platform
Learnings and failures along the journey towards adoption
31 May 2022
The Design Outlook Festival (UX Design SaaS Meetup)
Theme: Design Leadership, Scaling Design
As design gets traction and the spotlight it deserves, practitioners and leaders are taking the opportunity to grow their practice. Yet as many know, there are many hurdles to jump and success isn’t always guaranteed.
I shared my experience building and growing design practices across both the corporate and agency world. I also shared my recipe for what has worked and what hasn’t. The audience walked away with some useful tips to help them pave the way to grow their design practice within their organisation. And during my talk, I posed a controversial question for the audience to ponder!
18 February 2021
Leading the Product Sydney Meetup
Theme: Product Design
I talked about Avoiding Digital Product Failure.
As recently as 2018, Fortune 500 companies spent $600 billion directly on R&D. Yet according to studies from Harvard, MIT, Michigan State, and others, about 75% of all products fail. This is staggering, especially when there are mature frameworks and methodologies (e.g. HCD, Agile and Scrum, Product Management) that when followed, reduce risk and increase confidence in success. In this talk, I shared three common pitfalls, gave example case studies, and talked about tools and frameworks that can help decrease the chances of product failure (but obviously not guarantee it).
Recording of a similar talk at UX Design in SaaS meetup (42 minute mark)
24 August 2019
Product Camp Melbourne - Product anonymous
Theme: User Research
I had the pleasure of attending the amazing #pcampmelb 2019 un-conference run by @Product Anonymous Group. My talk on the importance of user/customer research via qualitative methods (e.g. interviews) was selected by attendees. Conducting such research (even if very small, quick and sharp) can go a long way in ensuring you make the right product decisions and de-risk building a product based on internal assumptions and anecdotes.
My talk was to help product people and practitioners fight the good fight and arm themselves with rationale when they encountered resistance.
13-15 March 2019
Design Research - UX Australia Conference
Theme: User Research
Academia might give us the standards for rigour in research, but it certainly doesn’t have an edge in innovating how we do this kind of work. Trello, invented for project management, actually serves quite nicely as a digital space for qualitative data collection, synthesis and analysis. The audience learnt when and how to leverage this tool in their next qualitative study.
Data collection: organising boards and cards
Synthesis: leveraging the labels, stickers, and card sorting features
Analysis: presenting (participant-protected) information in a coherent visual way
27 October 2018
Allycamp Conference
Theme: Accessibility
I shared how we tackled accessibility at Transpire, and how the various disciplines of design, engineering and QA drive and changed their processes to ensure a leading, usable and accessible mobile app.
The audience walked away with useful takeaways of what to do and not do, and what to consider when embarking on a mobile app development project.
10 July 2018
Melbourne Web Meetup / UX Australia 2015 Conference
Theme: Design democratisation
During Agile Australia 2014, I took the opportunity to survey attendees around UX. One of the questions was:
“I see UXers as the owners of the design in a project. (i.e. if they are not there, the design should not be changed)”.
The result of this question was interesting. During my presentation, I covered the results from the survey and then deep dove into the theme of design ownership and its impact on the productivity of an agile project team. I used some example Agile project case studies to show where things can go right or wrong when the availability of individuals with dedicated ‘prescribed’ roles changes.
UX is not wizardry – it’s a process, right?! So how does this mentality change what a team does to deliver Agile projects? I proposed some thoughts on how we could mitigate risks associated with role changes to ensure a project can still run smoothly.
9-10 May 2018
Managing Design Conference - UX Australia
Theme: Design leadership
This talk was aimed at people who are about to embark on the next chapter in their design career - taking on a Lead or Head of design role at an organisation or managing a team of designers. I shared my experiences across my entire career, and what I've learnt to do and not to do when managing and leading teams. The talk armed the audience to be better prepared when they took on a role to lead and empower our future designers and organisations' design maturity.
20 May 2016
Managing Design Conference - UX Australia
(Lightning talk)
Theme: Design leadership
This was a 10 minutes lightning talk where I shared my top 10 learnings of being a UX design manager.
Other past talks and presentations include:
Swinburne University 2021 - Accessibility Masterclass
Optimal Workshop Roadshow 2017 - Importance of user research
UX Australia 2015 - Design democratisation
Agile Australia 2014 - Quantifying Qualitative UX Research