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
Daniel J. Rosenberg
Digital Medicine Design
2019 • Enterprise Community
Charlotte Lee
Theme 1 Intro
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Maria Taylor
Knowledge is Power: Managing the Lifeblood of the Design Org
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Etienne Fang
Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Panel Discussion: Communicating the Value of DesignOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Take Back those Words! Reclaiming and Reenergizing the Vocabulary of UX
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Daniel Gloyd
Transcendent Experience (ZX) Design: A Design Framework for Human Connection
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Nicole Bergstrom
AccessibilityOps: Moving beyond “nice to have”
2024 • DesignOps Community
Jeff Ephraim Bander
Eye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Jen Cardello
Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Broad Strokes: Connecting Design, Research, and AI to the World Around Us
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Day 1 Welcome
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 2 Intro
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Deanna Mitchell
Designing with culture: Unlocking impactful insights for Product and UX
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Melinda Belcher
Insider preview of Enterprise Experience 2020
2020 • Enterprise Community

More Videos

Erika Kincaid

"Feedback is a gift; it’s always about the work and never about the person."

Erika Kincaid Brenna Heaps Jessica Tsukimura

Connecting the Dots: How to Foster Collaboration and Build a Strong Design Review Culture

June 8, 2022

Catherine Courage

"Saying no with purpose and rationale helped us scale from nine people to over 150 without burning out the team."

Catherine Courage

The Enterprise UX Journey: Lessons From the Voyage & The Opportunity Ahead

May 13, 2015

Shahrzad Samadzadeh

"The size of your role doesn't determine your impact; it's how your role fits into the bigger picture."

Shahrzad Samadzadeh

What Is My Value? Two Takes and Some Mistakes

January 8, 2024

Bria Alexander

"Design ops has an opportunity to inject human-centeredness into product development to balance business and customer value."

Bria Alexander Meredith Black Tim Gilligan

State of DesignOps Panel

October 1, 2021

Bud Caddell

"There’s still folks who are entering saying I’m a team of one, no one knows what I do."

Bud Caddell Kristin Skinner Alana Washington

DesignOps Community Sensing Session

May 13, 2021

Ian Johnson

"Similar inputs will produce similar high dimensional numbers."

Ian Johnson

Latent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data

June 11, 2025

Rob Mitzel

"We created a UX Club to talk shop, share struggles, and build ideas across teams."

Rob Mitzel Sébastien Malo

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

January 8, 2024

Gabriela Barneva

"Inclusive design operations bring together efficiency and meaningful design by embedding inclusivity into processes."

Gabriela Barneva

Operationalizing Inclusive Design in Design Ops

September 11, 2025

Vincent Brathwaite

"Collaboration among technologists, ethicists, and healthcare professionals is key."

Vincent Brathwaite

Opener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams

October 22, 2020