We'll open the doors a little early and let folks in. Sometimes, we have surprises, sometimes, we play music, sometimes it's a little quiet. Get there a little early to be ready for kick-off!

Starting the event!

Beyond Templates: Using AI as a Thought Partner for Design Leadership

Design leaders spend hundreds of hours annually on performance management – reviews, 1:1s, feedback conversations, career development plans – yet most of us received no formal training in these skills. As teams scale, the cognitive load becomes unsustainable. This talk shares a practical framework for using AI as a thought partner for people management work, with specific workflows and prompting strategies for performance review preparation, difficult conversation scripting, 1:1 structuring, and career development planning – drawn from managing a 20+ person distributed design team at an enterprise software company.

This isn’t about automating empathy or generating templated feedback. You’ll learn the critical guardrails: what AI can help with versus where human judgment is non-negotiable. Whether you manage 2 people or 20, you’ll leave with immediately actionable approaches – specific prompt frameworks you can adapt, a starter workflow for integrating AI into your management practice, and honest guidance on measuring impact without compromising psychological safety.

Tami Evnin

Tami Evnin is Director of Platform Design at Diligent, a global GRC software company, where she leads a 20-person design team. She’s driving AI innovation across Diligent’s portfolio, including a design system MCP for faster design-to-code handoff, the design of Diligent’s first AI-powered analytics tool, and the broader vision for human-AI collaboration across all products.

With over 15 of experience in enterprise software design, Tami specializes in building design operations, systems thinking, and scaling design leadership. Outside of work, she explores textile arts and quilting in Chicago, bringing the same systems-thinking approach to both her professional practice and creative pursuits.

For more, keep up with Tami at tamievnin.com.

15 minute break.

Rigour and agility: Balancing both in UX Research

Those that carry out research are often caught between two forces: the demand for speed in agile environments and the need for credibility and depth in their work. Too much rigour can slow things down. Too much agility can dilute insight. But what if we could do both?

In this session, we’ll explore how today’s leading teams are embracing a new mindset: one that fuses agility with rigour to produce insight that’s both rapid and reliable.

Expect practical examples, honest reflections, and bold ideas on how to navigate this evolving landscape. Whether you're a researcher, designer, or product lead, this talk will leave you rethinking what’s possible for UX research.

Veronica Naguib

Veronica Naguib is the Managing Director at ImpactSense, an insight company who are disrupting the way research and Experience Measurement is done today. Experienced in both Service Design and UX, Veronica is an expert in transforming the CX discipline, previously heading up CX teams. She’s worked with diverse sectors from healthcare to retail to transport across B2C, B2B and Government Bodies.

15 minute break.

AI-Accelerated Discovery: Delivering Faster Insights with Jobs to Be Done

In today’s fast-paced business environment, time-to-insight is critical. Yet, conducting Job To Be Done (JTBD) interviews can be a lengthy and cumbersome process that often compromises the rigor needed to extract meaningful insights. This session addresses this tension by exploring how AI tools can accelerate discovery analysis without sacrificing depth or accuracy.

We will explore practical strategies for leveraging AI to streamline the identification of job dimensions, triggers, and outcomes from JTBD interviews. By automating the process of consistently extracting key insights using the framework for guide rails, teams can significantly reduce their time-to-insight while maintaining a consistent framework across multiple projects and team members. This not only positions JTBD as high-value, strategic work but also enables faster iteration cycles for product development.

Attendees will learn how to integrate AI into their research and discovery processes effectively, ensuring that they understand how to extract accurate insights. The session will conclude with a look at how these techniques can be applied in real-world scenarios to enhance strategic decision-making and drive innovation. By the end of this session, participants will have actionable strategies to implement AI-driven JTBD analysis as a customer-driven “north star” in their organizations.

Elaine Matthias

Elaine Matthias is a design and innovation strategist who helps organizations break down silos and accelerate innovation through structured discovery and problem framing. As co-founder of the JTBD Toolkit, she creates resources that guide product teams through systematic decision-making using the Jobs to Be Done framework. With 15 years of product and web design experience across corporate, agency, non-profit and start-up environments, she brings practical expertise to innovation challenges. She co-chaired Interaction22 and served as president of NYC UXPA from 2014-2016.

15 minute break.

Inclusivity by Design

Most organizations treat inclusive design as a nice-to-have checkbox rather than a strategic imperative. It’s time to change that conversation.

Inclusive design isn’t about helping one group—it’s about recognizing that people aren’t one-dimensional and creating solutions that flex to meet real human complexity.

Through real-world examples and practical workplace applications, attendees will see how inclusive thinking extends far beyond disability accommodations. This talk reframes inclusive design from a compliance burden to a business opportunity—inclusive design boosts usability by up to 30%, benefiting all users, not just those with disabilities.

Natalie will de-mystify how inclusive design differs from universal or accessible design, highlight inclusive practices when hiring and building diverse design teams, and unveil the secret formula that gets stakeholders to care about inclusive design.

Natalie Kurz

Natalie Kurz has spent the last 20+ years leading both in-house and agency product design teams across enterprise UX, fintech, government, and healthcare — spaces where clarity, trust, and empathy are essential. She’s known for transforming complicated, fragmented systems into intuitive, connected experiences, always with a focus on making the complex feel simple, connected, and human.

One of her passions is building diverse and inclusive teams where designers are empowered to challenge ideas, grow their craft, and do their best work. She thrives at the intersection of systems thinking and emotional intelligence — scaling design operations, mentoring emerging leaders, and advocating for design as a strategic function that drives businesses forward.

A former innovation fellow at the CFPB, she’s also led design efforts for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, U.S. Digital Services, Carnival Cruise Lines, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Subaru, Citibank, State Farm, Express-Scripts, and the CW Network. She’s previously presented on UX, content strategy, and agile practices at Chicago Camps, edUI, 18F Speaker Series, Agile Government Leadership, IA Summit, and G2 Xchange podcasts.

15 minuted break.

Are You Performing Workshop Theatre? (3 Red Flags)

72% of meetings are unproductive, costing $37B annually (Zippia). Sticky notes everywhere, outcomes nowhere. Are your workshops any better — or just Workshop Theatre (superficial collaboration rituals that look productive but deliver zero value)?

I popularized UX Theatre seven years ago. Now I’ve diagnosed its workshop mutation: 3 Vital Signs reveal if your sessions are healthy or dying.

Join me to explore (and fix!):

Red Flag #1: No preparation = “What are we even doing here?”
Red Flag #2: Wrong activities = busywork, not outcomes
Red Flag #3: Poor facilitation = “Loudest voice wins”

This session is perfect for: UX practitioners, service designers, workshop facilitators, and teams battling collaboration chaos. And you’ll have a chance to grab my 10-question diagnostic scorecard to help you diagnose your workshops.

Tanya Snook

Tanya Snook popularized UX Theatre seven years ago as the viral critique of superficial design rituals. She’s founder of spydergrrl consulting and CanUX Conference (Canada’s longest-running UX event).

Tanya coaches facilitators using her proprietary Workshop Workshop methodology to architect real collaboration, not theatre. Her corporate workshop design training transforms chaotic sessions into engineered outcomes.

Tanya’s work has been featured in Fast Company Co.Design. She has spoken about design leadership and UX Theatre for various UX events and podcasts. She shares facilitation secrets through the Workshop Alchemy newsletter and writes about design leadership at spydergrrl.com.

15 minute break.

Billie Mandel

Billie Mandel is a multidisciplinary social scientist, leadership coach and team collaboration expert with 30 years’ international business experience leading software R&D teams to innovate, grow and create more effectively together.

As a first-wave UXer and (often token) out lesbian leader, and now as a leadership and collaboration coach for women and feminist professionals and teams, she’s spent decades in your boardrooms watching you make the same mistakes over and over. Now that she’s a self-employed CEO, living her best life in her Sea Witch era, she’s fully empowered to tell all the tales and spill all the tea, for our collective amusement, benefit, and growth.

Her company, Mandel Creative, is a queer feminist learning and development consultancy and innovation incubator for creative and technical professionals and teams, and has some spicy new programs coming up! Subscribe to her mailing list at www.billiemandel.com and follow her on LinkedIn to hear the news when it’s fresh and hot!

Wrapping up the day.