Pro/Design Masterclass

Join us for

The Pro/Design Masterclass

A free half day masterclass including a panel, presentation, and interview exploring how startups can incorporate customer feedback into their corporate culture to stay in tune with customers’ needs.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

FOUNDERS

Learn how to embed design research into your organization, better understand your target audience, and validate your assumptions.

DESIGNERS/RESEARCHERS

Discover how to help everyone in the organization participate in customer research, and use those findings to make informed design decisions.

ADVISORS

Help clients find the right people to talk to in order to validate the initial offering, pivot and change direction based on feedback, and encourage a culture of listening to what will make customers happy.

Program

9:00-9:30 Registration

9:30-10:15- Better Understanding Your Customers

Hear from past and present researchers at startups to learn how they incorporated customer feedback into their corporate cultures. Learn from their successes and failures, various research methodologies and approaches, and how they have refined their feedback process to stay in tune with customers’ needs.

Panelists

Niveen Sayeed, Innovation + Design Strategist, UX Researcher/Designer and Cultural Futurist

Danae Holmes, PhD, UX Researcher at Twitch

Uday Gajendar, Principal UX Consultant

Amy Abito, UX + Visual Designer

Moderator

Megan Grocki, Director of Customer Insights at Nasdaq

10:30-11:15 - Best Practices for Starting and Scaling Customer Discovery

Speaker Megan Grocki

Customer-focused research will help you get answers to specific questions that are tied to business objectives. By gaining consensus on what you’re trying to accomplish and what you want to better understand, you can help your team make meaningful changes to the business/products/services. This session will help you start your customer research practice in a way that can grow with the business to keep your finger on the pulse of customer needs.

11:30-12:00 - Conversation with Steve Portigal

We’ll interview Steve Portigal, founder of Bay Area research consultancy Portigal Consulting, and author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. Steve’s extensive interviewing practice coupled with his consulting expertise make him an ideal coach for entrepreneurs who want to discover and act on new insights about their customers.

OUR SPEAKERS

Niveen Sayeed, Innovation + Design Strategist, UX Researcher/Designer and Cultural Futurist

Danae Holmes, PhD, UX Researcher at Twitch

Amy Abito, UX + Visual Designer

Uday Gajendar, Principal UX Consultant

Megan Grocki, Director of Customer Insights at Nasdaq

Steve Portigal, Founder of Portigal Consulting