2026 Agenda

• Building executive-aligned impact frameworks that connect UXR/D improvements directly to revenue growth, cost savings, and strategic objectives
• Mastering UXR/D storytelling that resonates with leadership to secure resources and elevate design's strategic role
• Creating resilient organizational models and communication strategies that establish research and design teams as essential business partners

• Building the business case for UX - Crafting compelling proposals that position UX as a strategic investment
•  Effectively communicating value to C-suite leadership to scale your team
• Strategies to shift from reactive to proactive for transforming UX culture, moving the team from order-taking to strategic partnership
• Leveraging UX's unique ability to visualize and paint the innovative future of the organization

• Exploring how product teams can diagnose their discovery environment and adapt their processes to maximize success across three distinct contexts
• Assessing six critical factors (congestion, debt, constraints, competition, morale, and confidence) to identify whether you're operating in a greenfield, brownfield, or concrete jungle context.
• Tailoring strategies for each environment — from rapid experimentation in greenfields, to value regeneration in brownfields, to stakeholder alignment in concrete jungles.
• Understanding how matching your discovery process to your context can help teams avoid costly mistakes, duplicated work, and resource misallocation.

• Five to six high-impact, actionable practices teams can implement immediately to improve accessibility and meet EAA requirements
• How to embed accessibility into every stage of the design and development lifecycle, from discovery and design to QA and release — without slowing teams down
• How to include users with disabilities in research and testing to uncover issues that guidelines alone cannot reveal

• Why screens as we know it are no longer the centre of digital experience
• How design moves from interfaces to relationships and context
• What the post-screen era means for UX, products and organisations
• Why care, vulnerability and dissidence are becoming design skills, and why this shift changes not only what we build, but how we think, decide and lead.

As AI transforms the design landscape, the most valuable skills we possess are uniquely human—our ability to connect, empathize, and understand one another. This highly interactive workshop explores how vulnerability, compassion, and empathy serve as essential human superpowers for truly understanding users in our current technological age. Through hands-on exercises and collaborative activities, participants will:

• Reconnect with their human superpowers that AI cannot replicate
• Practice listening more deeply and seeing the world through another's eyes through improvisation techniques and games
• Develop practical frameworks for bringing empathy back to the center of digital experiences

  This interactive session brings the human element back into conversations about design and technology, creating space for authentic connection and reflection. Participants will leave with renewed confidence in their irreplaceable value as your ultimate superpower.

• Evolving organizational approaches to talent management across all career stages, from junior hires to senior practitioners, and how businesses are rethinking recruitment, skills development, retention, and career pathways in response to industry transformation
• Addressing the changing landscape of UX talent with the current market challenges, identifying skill gaps across experience levels, and exploring diverse pathways into design roles that extend beyond traditional boundaries
• Practical strategies for mentoring, knowledge transfer between generations, continuous learning programs, and creating environments where designers at all levels can thrive and advance

• Why it's crucial to rewire strategic leadership alignment in the Product/UX process and how it can amplify long-term impact on teams
• Framework on C-suite partnership and alignment to focus on top-impact areas to effectively drive business outcomes.
• How to build trusted product experiences featuring successful cross-BU partnerships

• Implementing UX metrics to quantify design and research impact and drive data-informed product and strategic decisions
• Leveraging research insights to bring clarity across the product lifecycle, from conception to market.
• Fostering partnerships and data literacy, elevating research beyond an evaluation function to drive transformation.

• Breaking down organizational silos by consolidating fragmented UI/UX functions into a unified design system that standardizes processes, automates workflows, and creates consistent user experiences across internal and external products
• Applying GenAI to accelerate UX transformation—from rapid prototyping and design migration to modernizing legacy interfaces and empowering teams to work more efficiently
• Building strategic capabilities through centralized guidelines, frameworks, and governance that enable enterprise-wide design excellence while developing new organizational competencies for the AI era

• Integrating UX in safety-first, siloed industrial enterprises with rigid engineering processes
• Building & evolving DesignOps and UX research for decentralized teams
• Legitimizing design through UXUI Governance in the development lifecycle
• Bridging disciplines with Community Management to weave design into global operations

• Embracing the messy reality—designing through uncertainty, iteration, and the chaos of real-world constraints, especially as AI reshapes our workflows
• Navigating blurred boundaries—understanding where AI transforms traditional design stages and where human insight remains irreplaceable
• Prioritizing rapid learning—moving fast with early feedback loops instead of chasing elusive perfection
• Mastering strategic trade-offs—balancing ambiguity, effort allocation, and knowing exactly what to keep human

• Conducting UX research in unpredictable physical environments—barns, fields, and working farms—where mud, machinery, and seasonality shape every study
• Understanding farmers as unique users: highly skilled experts juggling traditional practices with cutting-edge technology, often with limited digital fluency
• Navigating recruitment and stakeholder challenges to access time-constrained end users while advocating for their voice within the organization

• Making qualitative insights actionable through collaborative, rapid journey-based problem prioritization with stakeholders to align on focus areas. 
• Transforming subjective UX decisions into data-driven strategy using Outcome-driven innovation (ODI). 
• Converting user pain points into outcome statements, calculating opportunity scores, and identifying the highest-impact areas.
• Elevating UX maturity and turning ambiguous discovery findings into a clear, high-impact product roadmap.

• Understanding how traditional role boundaries are dissolving as cross-functional collaboration intensifies, and strategies for defining clear responsibilities while maintaining fluid teamwork in modern product development.
• Developing skillsets that allow UX professionals to speak the language of product strategy and technical implementation, enabling more effective collaboration and influence across disciplines
• Creating organizational structures and workflows that leverage overlapping expertise rather than fighting it—turning role convergence from a threat into a strategic advantage for innovation and speed