🤝 🎨 Design as a team: A practical guide to cross-functional collaboration 😎🙌

For this online event, we've partnered with our friends at Yext!

Yext is a hosted search-as-a-service platform that empowers businesses to build frictionless digital experiences wherever consumers look for answers. At the foundation of our platform is a Knowledge Graph, a brain-like database that stores all of a business’s most important information. This enables brands to deliver direct answers to customer questions in the form of featured snippets, maps, FAQs, custom calls to action, and more. The same information can sync from the Knowledge Graph to any of our 250+ integrations with industry partners, so businesses can manage data and capture consumer intent with the tools they trust. Learn more about Yext at https://www.yext.com/

We're also teaming up with our friends at Small Planet to give away THREE $50 gift cards. In our collective quest to support small businesses, you'll get the gift card to a small business of your choice! Learn more about Small Planet at https://smallplanet.com/

Schedule:
6:30pm: Login to Zoom and hang out in chat
6:40pm: Intro to BK Product Design and Yext
6:50pm: Design as a team: A practical guide to cross-functional collaboration with Valerie Roske and Christopher Taylor Edwards from Thoughtworks
7:20pm: Q&A and Design discussion: bring your questions!
7:50pm: Zoom hangs & networking!

▶️── 🔈 Talk ───▶️

Design as a team: A practical guide to cross-functional collaboration
by Valerie Roske and Christopher Taylor Edwards @ Thoughtworks

We believe cross-functional collaboration accelerates delivery of better outcomes for our users. However, it’s not always obvious what exactly that might look like. What practices are necessary to the team’s success? What values should the team embody?

And who are we? We are a developer (Valerie) and a designer (Christopher) who love cross-functional pairing. We’ve put into practice everything we suggest below in a distributed team and in a high-pressure, time-sensitive context, where there was no access to design capability within the client organization. Even while working under tight delivery timelines, we found a way to prioritize learning and experimentation.

We’ll provide specific examples of what cross-functional collaboration can look like while sharing some of the values and principles that motivate us. We hope this can serve as inspiration for your teams and broaden your perception of how design can deliver greater value during the business process.

Valerie Roske is a Lead Software Developer @ Thoughtworks. She is a software generalist passionate about building people-first products and teams. Valerie is an advocate for accessibility and inclusive design as critical to software delivery and is constantly looking for ways to facilitate team cohesion and cross-disciplinary collaboration in service of that goal. She also enjoys discovering and maximizing the strengths of both individuals and collectives.

Christopher is a Lead Experience Designer @ Thoughtworks. He is passionate about bringing great customer experiences to life, delivering what matters to the user and value to the business. Christopher does this by helping great teams design better and working across functions. With over 20 years of experience, he works with toolkits from service design, ethnography, org design, and behavioral change. As a late-deafened adult, Christopher is an advocate for inclusive design and has spoken at international conferences on how we need to shift our focus for accessibility to a user problem to be solved, not just a standard to be met.

Valerie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valerie-roske-7a565653
Christopher's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophertayloredwards/

▶️── 🔈 Design Discussion ───▶️

Do you have any successful ways that you use to work better with developers? Or what have you done in the past to try and get better engagement with your development partners? Maybe you just have a question that you want to ask fellow designers. Whatever design topic you want to discuss, we're trying something new and hosting a free-form design discussion. (We may split into smaller groups to facilitate better conversation.)

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Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/bkproductdesign/shared_invite/zt-4vkd78k0-xPQeGdtYZMs3eJIUmqwJwg
Submit a talk: https://sites.google.com/view/bkproductdesign/speakers

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