Rosenverse
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Enterprise Storytelling Sessions

Gold
Monday, June 3, 2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Share the love for this talk
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
Speakers: Dan Willis
Link:

Summary

A highlight of the conference every year, the Storytelling Sessions are a set of five-minute talks from enterprise professionals who share their challenges, opinions, failures and successes. Here are the storytellers for Enterprise Experience 2019: - Stephanie Albright, Experience Designer, a story about cleaning bathrooms - Spencer Icasiano, Product Designer II / UX Researcher, Care.com, a story about transitions - Malia Nagle, Director, UX Research, PayPal, a story about two apologies - Laura Nash, Senior UX Designer, Boston Consulting Group, a story about personas who think for themselves - Jenn Noinaj, UX Designer, U.S. Digital Service, a story about stereotypes - Ilona Posner, UX Consultant, a story about keyholes - Malini Rao, Senior Manager, UX, Kronos Inc., a story about a fight

Key Insights

  • Storytelling became widespread in conferences in the last five years to counter audience distraction and increase engagement.

  • Audience attention varies drastically during the day; storytelling aims to combat mid-day and end-of-day disengagement.

  • The concept of 'keyholes' illustrates how limited perspectives obscure important organizational context and cause unexpected conflicts.

  • Professional expertise, like UX skills, doesn’t always apply in personal or emotional domains such as parenting, which require empathy and time.

  • Moving abroad triggers emotional phases—excitement, frustration, acceptance, and adjustment—that teach resilience and growth.

  • Organizational resistance can impede UX progress, but persistence, collaboration, and design thinking can bridge gaps between user needs and business goals.

  • Apologizing openly and vulnerably can transform difficult relationships into productive partnerships in product teams.

  • Personas can become more effective by adopting qualities from role-playing character sheets: accountability, conflict, temporary states, and evolution.

  • Bringing authentic, even quirky personal interests into work can foster memorable and genuine connections.

  • Queerness as a concept symbolizes embracing change and rejecting binary thinking, a principle that strengthens personal identity and innovation in UX.

Notable Quotes

"The more specific a story gets, the more universal the themes are felt by everybody."

"Outside of our keyholes lies information we’re completely oblivious to that can come to haunt us."

"No matter how good I am at my job, it doesn’t make me a good parent. What makes a good parent is time, love, compassion, and a sense of humor."

"Pushing my boundaries and getting out of my comfort zone helped me learn what I was capable of."

"Make an uncredible experience credible. That was the directive from organizational resistance to UX."

"In a fight, there’s a winner and a loser. But for a product to be successful, it has to work both for users and business."

"It’s never too late to apologize. And don’t be afraid to say, I’m sorry."

"Personas need to push back. Conflict makes for better stories and better products."

"When I let my outside interest in, I suddenly had really memorable conversations with people."

"Queerness is change. The power to shape that change is within every one of us."

Ask the Rosenbot
Dave Hoffer
UX Job Search AMA #3 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Russ Unger
Getting Out from Under Everyone: How to Escape the Paralysis of Getting Started
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Dave Hora
A Research Skills Evolution
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Devon Powers
Imagining Better Futures
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Dawn Ressel
Full-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Opening Remarks
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Patrizia Bertini
The (r)evolution of designOps: It’s Time to Think (really) BIG
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Kritika Sony
Moving AI offscreen: Exploring failures, constraints, and recovery in physical game design
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Welcome / Housekeeping
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
David Cronin
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Mujtaba Hameed
Frameworks for Excellence: Using Visual Thinking and Communication to Elevate Your Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Mackenzie Cockram
Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Research from Discovery to Live
2022 • QuantQual Interest Group
Shawna Hein
Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Theresa Slate
Why Changing Hearts & Minds Doesn’t Work When Promoting DE&I Efforts, but Checklists Do
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Adel Du Toit
Get Your CFO To Say: 'Our Strategic Goal is User Obsession'
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold

More Videos

Candace Myers

"Reducing cognitive load means some decisions should just be made for the team to free mental bandwidth."

Candace Myers

Standardizing Design at Scale

September 9, 2022

Sarah Sgarlato Pierini

"Go find a partner in Ops who has a passion for operations and pain points of inefficiency, then build something great together."

Sarah Sgarlato Pierini Kevin Newton

From Passion to Execution: A Story of Evolving Research Maturity at LinkedIn

September 9, 2022

Cennydd Bowles

"If you don’t understand business, you don’t deserve a seat at the C-suite table."

Cennydd Bowles Dan Rosenberg Lisa Welchman

Day 1 Panel

June 4, 2024

Rob Mitzel

"You owe it to your organization and your team to grow the practice while staying true to your vision."

Rob Mitzel Sébastien Malo

The Tale of Two Companies: Building a Successful UX Practice in a Century-Old Enterprise

January 8, 2024

Maria Taylor

"Self-efficacy boosts motivation to share knowledge by increasing confidence in one’s ability to perform that sharing."

Maria Taylor

Knowledge is Power: Managing the Lifeblood of the Design Org

October 3, 2023

Joe Meersman

"Packaging your work aligns stakeholders and manages objections instead of hoping the work speaks for itself."

Joe Meersman Pooria Sohi

Use AI to Drive Outcomes that Go Beyond the Design Sprint

September 25, 2024

Sara Asche Anderson

"The word obsessed is provocative and meant to push us to continually ask what can we do more."

Sara Asche Anderson Jamie Kaspszak

Not Your Ordinary Re-Brand: Design's Path to Driving Customer Obsession at Best Buy

January 8, 2024

David Cronin

"One sign of evidence that you've passed an inflection point is when you hire me as a consultant."

David Cronin Uday Gajendar Peter Morville Kendra Shimmell

Discussion

May 13, 2015

Kristin Skinner

"Stay interviews ask why people choose to stay, which provides more actionable retention data than exit interviews."

Kristin Skinner Kamdyn Moore

Group Activity: A Deep Dive Into Value and Outcomes

October 23, 2019