Margo Stern

Content Strategist, Facebook

Margo Stern, a Content Strategist at Facebook, has been making the rounds in Silicon Valley content circles since it became a thing (about ten years ago). After stepping away from a conventional career in advertising, she helped shape the Content Strategy discipline at both Google and Twitter. Margo lives in San Francisco with her husband and (at least) two cats.

When she’s not working, Margo can be found at a dance or yoga class or at the top of a local mountain. She’s also a member of a musical improv troupe with regular shows in San Francisco.

For more, keep up with Margo at margostern.com.

Make your Own Demands: Forging a Career Path in Content Strategy

Now that some of the industry has begun to rally around the job title of “Content Strategist,” what does the actual job and career path look like? Why should we keep showing up and do the hard job, at scale? What are the challenges we all face, and when is some of this wicked ambiguity going to get cleared up?

In this talk, I consider the common challenges of a CS, the insecurities we battle, and how to sort out what to do when we’re faced with them. Drawing on my experience at Google, Twitter and Facebook both as a manager and as an individual contributor, I’ll share my worst mistakes, my best wisdom, and maybe some well-intentioned speculation.

Shelby Bower

Discovery & Service Design Lead, Morningstar

Shelby is currently working at Morningstar, using skills picked up over the years in service design, product management, business design, and yes, user experience, not to improve the veggie burger but to improve how people invest their money and the outcomes they achieve from it.

With nearly 20 years in the tech industry, Shelby’s seen a lot of things come and go and believes that we have an opportunity we must seize, as people who work in technology: the opportunity to repair, fix and sometimes start over what we’ve created so far, so that we can build an internet that serves everyone and makes lives better.

To Nudge or Not to Nudge? Designing Ethically with Behavioral Science

Behavioral economics and applied data science have experienced a meteoric rise in the technology world, but just like the birth control pill, distance running and day trading, we have no real idea of the long-term impact of what we’re doing. We’ve seen some good stuff happen (DuoLingo) and a much longer list of technology that’s had truly undesirable effects on human interaction (Facebook, for shorthand on the subject).

So, when is it okay to use this new understanding of how our minds work? What kind of data is it ethical to gather and use to predict what people will do? When should you use predictive analytics or algorithms to “help” people make “good” decisions? Who defines “help” or and “good”? And when it comes down to it, who decides when the organization you work for comes ahead of the people who use your service?

This talk will break down the broad categories of how behavioral economics and data science are influencing services today and describe the current, known impact of what’s being done. Then we’ll talk about how to determine when it’s ethical to “nudge” people and when it’s not, and finally, how to work with your team to develop a code of ethics and policies around data usage and “nudges” that you can use for transparency with your end users and your c-suite.