Theme 1: Discussion
Lada Gorlenko
Senior Director of Research at MURAL
Sharbani Dhar
Program Design Lead, Australia Post
Sébastien Malo
UX Research and Design Manager, CN
Rob Mitzel
DesignOps and Enablement Team Supervisor, Ford Motor Company
Ivana Ng
Director of Product, Nava PBC
Michal Anne Rogondino
Founder & CEO, Rocket Communications, Inc.
Summary
Join today's speakers for Q&A and discussion of the day's topics.
Key Insights
-
•
Invest in operations early in a company’s growth to build a strong foundation for UX and product success.
-
•
Interacting extensively at peer levels can be as or more effective than immediately engaging top executives.
-
•
Usability testing in the real context of users is critical to uncovering actionable insights pre-launch.
-
•
Qualitative user feedback and anecdotal success stories often resonate more than formal metrics in early UX advocacy.
-
•
Existing business metrics may need to be questioned and replaced with more meaningful measures based on user behavior.
-
•
Creating safe forums and mentorship supports junior practitioners in building confidence to engage stakeholders.
-
•
Ongoing stakeholder education sustained through shared analytics and direct user feedback channels builds empathy and support.
-
•
Cross-organizational partnering helps spread UX adoption, but organizational stovepipes remain a challenge.
-
•
Embedding evangelism and teaching as part of day-to-day UX work drives steady culture change.
-
•
Compromises in delivery are acceptable, but never at the expense of achieving core business goals with UX.
Notable Quotes
"Operations tends to be something companies only think about when they are scaling rapidly, but investing early is essential."
"You can’t really advocate for UX or move an organization forward without interacting with your team and business colleagues."
"Junior team members don’t have to talk directly to executives; working effectively with peers can create grassroots buy-in."
"Simply asking stakeholders what success looks like for them in a project is a powerful way to start meaningful conversations."
"We can’t complain about not having a seat at the table if we don’t offer one of our own."
"The ultimate measure is bringing value so people invite you back to work with them again and again."
"If your users are happy, that anecdotal feedback often carries more weight early than quantitative metrics."
"Field usability testing showed stakeholders immediately how much value UX can add by catching issues before deployment."
"Stakeholders start demanding better digital experiences at work because they expect the same quality they have at home."
"We never compromise on the business goals, but how we achieve them can be flexible and pragmatic."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"The first stage we see is the accidental stage with silos and no consistent information across the organization."
Bram WesselEnterprise Information Architecture
January 10, 2020
"Design systems help address integration challenges and differing cadences between design and development."
John DevanneyThe Design Management Office
November 6, 2017
"Product managers are going to have to say no to roughly 95% of everything that comes in."
Rich MironovHow Can Product Managers and UXers Help Each Other (and Why are Product Folks so Annoying Sometimes)?
December 6, 2022
"Legacy applications linger because changing them is risk-ridden and a major undertaking."
Malini RaoLessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey
June 9, 2021
"When we look at group means, sometimes the intervention looks ineffective, but individuals benefited in ways big data averages can hide."
Iulia CornigeanuQuantQual Book Club: Small Data
March 8, 2024
"Communicating in an academic or marketing way builds suspense instead of building trust."
Bruce GillespieLearning from journalism: Balancing impactful communication with compassionate storytelling
March 13, 2025
"When you deliver MVPs without understanding the problem fully, you end up in endless cycles of fix-it-later and rework."
Rima Campbell Amrit S BhachuIncrease Productivity and Drive Business Impact
September 24, 2024
"LLMs don’t have memory, so rating on a scale from one to five is pretty random. Better to have yes or no answers."
Peter Van DijckHands-on AI #2: Understanding evals: LLM as a Judge
October 15, 2025
"Researchers and participants cannot tell the same story because they occupy different locations of power."
Bilan HashiThe Tension Between Story Collecting and Story Telling in Research
March 10, 2021
