Users' minds take shortcuts to get through the day. Usually, they’re harmless. Even helpful. But what happens when they’re not? In this talk, I’ll use real-world examples to identify some particularly harmful biases that frequently lead users to make bad decisions. I'll then talk about some content strategies and design choices we can use in our apps, designs, and platforms to redirect or eliminate the impact of those biases. Finally, I'll explore our own biases as designers and some methods to prevent our own blind spots from hurting users.

Modern businesses have disrupted traditional industries by leveraging technology and have created new standards of excellence. They’ve paved the way for new business models to deliver better value to customers and to a larger scale of customers than ever before. Netflix killed the cable TV business. Amazon transformed our shopping experience. Fitbit brought personal health to the forefront. They've created products that are in the hands of millions of people across the world.

Disruption of this magnitude is possible only by intersecting a strong engineering culture with a product strategy that is driven by customer insights. Today, stand-alone products are passè - platforms form a crucial foundation for an ecosystem of consumers, merchants and service providers. They enable businesses to reach a larger customer base, and shake up the industry. 

We relate the story of a true digital disruptor - an organization that chose to focus on turning the insurance industry on its head and changing how people think about their personal health. This is a story of ups and downs, of experiments and learning, of technical excellence and user-centric focus. Follow along with us, from once-upon-a-time-an-idea-was-born all the way through to the-users-lived-healthily-ever-after, in this story of how technology overhauled a traditional industry forever.

If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that the way we think about, well… everything has to change, including the way we think about work and leadership.

In this session, we will present the results of a research study conducted among global leaders, and explore how the pandemic has impacted the way we look after our teams, the differences between remote and in-person leadership, challenges and opportunities created by physical distance, and how to prevent it from also becoming emotional and intellectual distance.

We start from a set of questions we’ve asked ourselves both in the past and more recently:

• How do you create and maintain connection and trust when you cannot look someone in the eye or walk by their desk?
• How do you oversee work, advice, mentor and help people grow at a distance?
• How does a team that can’t get together, stay together?
• What kind of additional or different support does your team (and you) need?
• And more…

The June 2017 NIST special publication 800-63B, covering Digital Identity, turned what had previously been the gold standard for passwords on its head. For the first time, NIST recommended removing complexity rules and password cycles, supporting longer passwords, no restriction, or requirements  on special characters and preventing the use of  common passwords and those already exposed in a known breach. Why these changes? Because with the best will in the world, the human element in our security measures is always going to be the weakest link. Forcing individuals, particularly those whose primary role has nothing to do with Information Technology, to remember hundreds of unique complex passwords is hard. They don’t want to and when we make them, they get it wrong or look for an answer with as little friction as possible. NIST’s new guidelines are intended to remove some of that friction. When combined with the use of a password management system and multi factor authentication, we might hope that our corporate assets are no longer protected by the same password someone used on their favourite shopping site. 

Unfortunately, things are never that simple. For non-technical users, even working with a password manager can present challenges. Not all systems play nicely with password managers, and they also do not stop a user from using the same credential for more than one product. 

Passwordless authentication is one exciting way forward. This in itself, is not new technology, having been around in various forms for a while - think magic email links for example - but the approach still relies upon shared secrets. However, the release of the WebAuthN standard by the W3C and FIDO, supported by many key vendors, allows us to take advantage of public key cryptography.

At ThoughtWorks we have embarked on a journey to introduce passwordless login to our employees, particularly those with high value accounts and who may be less technical than many. The goal of this session is to share what we have learned throughout this process. We will share our goals, challenges and their resolutions. We hope attendees will be inspired to evaluate this technology, which delivers the rarest of things, better security and a fantastic user experience.     

We live in a complex world, there are no silver bullets to solve problems in this complex world. There has been done a lot of research on what makes teams successful, or what identifies a good team. The five dysfunctions of a team, the Rocket model, project Aristotle. I believe all those models have good components, but what would happen if you get the best of all those models, and also back them up with academic research?

In this talk, I would like to share six components that will help teams to create value. Six components based on research, existing models, best practices, and my experience as a manager. This talk will explain that successful teams: have trust, are reliable, have conflicts, understand their impact, care about results and have clarity. You will learn why these six components are important but also have some practical take-aways. For example, having conflicts is easy said. However, how do have conflicts, and help teams with conflicts?

The talk is connected to my latest book The Art of Teams.

Financial forecasts (Business Case) for startups and corporate innovation initiatives are notoriously unreliable. But instead of throwing them away entirely, it is possible to create a model, able to quantify the most likely outcome as well as uncertainty. Innovation accounting bridges the gap between innovation teams and finance and can track progress in a meaningful way.