UXDX EMEA is on the move!

We love Dublin. It's an amazing city, rich in culture, history, and incredible people. Dublin has been the home of UXDX since 2016, and it holds countless fantastic memories for us. 

Our audience has grown and evolved significantly since we started over 9 years ago now. With the majority of our attendees now coming from outside Ireland and more global. Moving to a new city was a big decision and not taken lightly, especially given our growth over the years, which wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible support and trust from so many of you who have come on board year after year, oftentimes without even so much as a published speaker. Building this trust with you and our community is nothing short of a privilege. The move at the end of the day marks a natural progression in our journey and the beginning of an exciting new chapter. While the move has been personally challenging, we remain an Irish company at heart, and we believe it's a great opportunity to refresh and start anew for UXDX.

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to visit Dublin, now is the time. UXDX EMEA 2024 is set to be our best event yet! Plus, during the conference, you’ll be among the first to hear about our exciting new location for 2025.

Join us for this special farewell and be part of the next chapter in UXDX’s journey!

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

TBM 280: 2-6-4-1 by John Cutler
John shares his view on the best timings for teams: 2 weeks discovery, 6 weeks to get something to customers, 4 weeks to iterate and 1 week to wrap up.

Visionary Leaders and Product Success by Mike Fisher
Are feature factories the right fit for visionary CEOs? Or do they always lead to products that fail to satisfy users?

Product Direction

From Data Chaos to Strategic Clarity: The Role of KPI Trees in Product Management by Benjamin Dupont
Benjamin explores the journey of using KPI trees to sift through complex data, providing a beacon for strategic decision-making.

Our Half-Baked Adoption of OKRs by Jim Morris
Many companies are jumping on the OKR bandwagon, but not all succeed. Jim dives into the details behind the failed adoptions.

Continuous Discovery

Don't Use Generative AI to Replace Discovery with Real Humans by Teresa Torres
When we use generative AI to replace talking to customers, we fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of good discovery.

Synthetic Users: If, When, and How to Use AI-Generated “Research” by Maria Rosala and Kate Moran
TLDR: don't. Slightly longer: there may be use cases for supplementing research rather than replacing it.

Continuous Design

Hiding Complexity To Create Effortless Onboarding by Peter Ramsey
The techniques that Slack have used to create an effortless onboarding flow, and why you might not want to copy them.

Can You Be Creative Just By Creating? by Anton Sten
A designer wrote to Anton concerned that they were boring rather than creative. However, once your customers are happy, you are designing well.

Continuous Delivery

Generative Ai Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You by Charity Majors
It’s easy to generate code, but not so easy to generate good code. You still need qualified people to understand when it is working and when it is not.

Coupling Facets by Gregor Hohpe
Coupling isn't binary nor is it a single dimension. Gregor shares the different types and dimensions of coupling sharing when and where to use and avoid them.

How much future thought should be put into our designs?

Ever hear two different talks from speakers who share conflicting advice?

Jod Kaftan, Head of Research and Design at Oracle is a futurism advocate - designers should think about the long term impacts. Pamela Mead, SVP of Global Design at SumUp favours practical solutions that work today. So what is the right approach? Join us in Dublin or online to hear Jod and Pamela debate the two sides so you can find what works best for you and your team.

Whose side are you on?

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Check out more upcoming community events 

New Video Released This Week

Dive into the lively debate between Mike Green from Reed and AJ King from Ocado as they tackle the buzzworthy topic of democratizing research. They passionately discuss whether giving product teams the power to do their own research boosts efficiency and innovation or if it just adds stress and risks quality. Packed with real-world examples, practical tips, and plenty of humor, this debate will get you thinking differently about user research. Watch the full video to see who wins the battle of ideas! 👇👇

Job of the Week

Senior Product Manager
Reed.co.uk
📌 London

About Reed
Founded in 1995, Reed.co.uk was the first recruitment website offered by a recruitment agency in the UK. Since then, Reed.co.uk has grown to become one of the UK's leading careers marketplaces.

See role details here

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: What extra support should frameworks provide?

Another competitive poll this week with the Scaling challenges winning out. I’m going to dig into this space more next week so stay tuned for that.

One of the things that is difficult with polls like this is precisely what we talked about last week: people focus on their areas. This means that the problems that different people face will be higher on their priority list.

We ran the same poll on LinkedIn a few weeks ago and I analysed the results for how people voted, based on their job title. There were some interesting findings like product management roles focused much more on idea generation, people with delivery roles wanted more focus on governance and funding and management roles focused more on scaling challenges.

You can read the full breakdown here (with charts!) if you are interested to see how people voted. My favourite one was the Product versus Project Management voting and how it highlights the difference in focus between effectiveness and efficiency.