As children, we played in order to learn about the world around us and press against our growing boundaries. We took wild journeys of fantasy where every object in front of us had possibilities. This concept of child-eyes essentially means abandoning our ingrained assumptions about the world around us and seeing something with a sense of innocence. This talk will cover the concept of play as a cognitive developer, examine case studies where play and imagination contributed to amazing product design, and give some ideas as to how we can continue to do this with our team and on our own everyday to help strengthen our play muscles. 

Over the past years, I've worked with a bunch of big enterprise companies who want to "do agile" development. In my experience, it's best to try to shift that expectation from "doing agile" to "being agile." Intrinsic in that philosophy are teams that have seamless communication through various disciplines. 

Given at User Conf London 2015A more focused talk on playful products and how product managers and companies can think about using games and creativity to engage their users. 

Talking about the common mistakes that teams make when executing user research, a common pattern is not allowing a enough space and silence around the user to allow their feedback to come through loud and clear. I call out these anti-patterns and offer tips that will help new researchers avoid them. 

This joint presentation by Pivotal Labs Product Manager Rosemary King, and UX Designer Simon Phillips will explore why up front investment in Discovery and Framing set up a project on solid foundation, how to react when unknown unknowns throw off the product plan, how to involve development teams in the exploration and synthesis process, and how to set a cadence for your UX design work so that a comfortable buffer exists to allow for continual evolution of the product based on user feedback and changing understanding. Baked into the presentation will be case studies, challenges and lessons learned on recent lean/agile projects.