YConf Europe 2022

Speaker: Inas Nureldin (Tomorrow)

Speaker: Joe Murray (Thoughtworks), Matt Rich (bp)

Time to value (TTV) accelerates when we combine better customer adoption rate/engagement with faster time to market. Designing your business around a branded, designed customer experience focused on delivering customer value is the only way to optimize TTV. We've seen many companies hop on the CX band wagon yet many are disappointed with their results. IDC's recent research indicates that over 80% of companies believe they deliver a great CX, yet only 11% of customers agree. During this talk Joe unpacks what it takes to execute your business as a customer engagement platform, organize the entire business with the customer at the center of the business, and shares a real example.

Speaker: Alexander Steinhart (Thoughtworks)

The world is changing. Extreme inequality exists in society, we face environmental challenges, and technology becomes more pervasive in our daily lives. Technology can address our problems, but it can also create and exacerbate them. 

Businesses increasingly need to be able to justify their choices, actions, and inactions regarding social value, avoid unintended and adversarial consequences, meet ESG reporting standards, and keep customer trust. 40% of the global population are “Aspirationals” valuing both quality and design and environmental and social impact. This way, ethical topics are not relevant for risk management and compliance only but move to value generation. 

In this talk, you — as leaders and innovators —  will learn about responsible product management, how we update our practices, see examples and learnings from our engagements.

Speakers: Gabe Fender (Thoughtworks), Rob Horn (Thoughtworks)

A lived example of the intersection between technology and users within a legacy displacement programme. All organisations have legacy systems, from 6 month old startups to 30 year industry giants. They reflect the journey taken to where they are today, but become legacy when they no longer enable the business’s goals. Putting humans, design and user experience at the heart of what is typically a technology lead exercise is, we believe, critical to successfully displacing this legacy with what your modern digital business truly needs.

Rob and Gabe will share their experiences from a multi-year legacy displacement programme on techniques and approaches that they used to deliver business transformation.

Speakers: Marco Bagger (Thoughtworks), Meki Lam (Thoughtworks), Vera Petermann (Thoughtworks)

As 2022 began, the many teams in our project found themselves in a difficult situation: A huge list of requirements emanating from an enterprise-wide change initiative.

Prioritizing is essential to a successful project. But when everything becomes top priority, you crown the requirement list queen, lose sight of what's important, and overwhelm teams with unrealistic timelines.

To turn things around, we focused on what users actually need to keep the business running. We decided to be radically honest - with ourselves, our stakeholders, and our users. Join our talk to learn more about how we challenged our way of delivering products with radical honesty!

Speakers: Minette Mangahas (Thoughtworks), Poorva Lavate (Thoughtworks) 

Digital transformation presents companies with valuable opportunities and daunting challenges. How do we ensure that the great investment required produces equally great results for both users and the bottom line? A critical piece of the solution is Service Design.

Over time, a company’s processes and scale outgrow the original scope of their existing systems, bogging down speed of delivery and increasing costs for the entire enterprise. But in transforming and expanding a platform, we need to do more than superficially update its UI design. This talk uncovers the value unlocked by Service Design and provides a framework with examples of how we implement it with our clients.

Speaker: Sara Michelazzo (Thoughtworks)

How can we build more inclusive software? In the past 6 months, a small team in Thoughtworks has conducted dozens of interviews with digitally challenged people to learn how they experience software, what empowers them and what disables them. These conversations have completely shifted Sara’s thinking and she promises, they will shift yours. Expect to learn how someone with autism experiences software, and what someone that is digitally impaired struggles with. The talk is packed with actionable insights on how to remove barriers that you can apply right away. You don't need to be an accessibility expert to start making a difference in this space.

Over time, a company’s processes and scale outgrow the original scope of their existing systems, bogging down speed of delivery and increasing costs for the entire enterprise. But in transforming and expanding a platform, we need to do more than superficially update its UI design. This talk uncovers the value unlocked by Service Design and provides a framework with examples of how we implement it with our clients.

Speakers: Gonzalo Carabaña (Thoughtworks), Marcel Schumacher (Scout24)

The speakers will share the main lessons learned while building “Standortanalyse”, the product that allows ImmobilienScout24 customers to better understand the real-estate market through data.

The product was originally developed for one customer group. To also offer value to other customer groups, the team drove innovation by placing customer feedback and data at the center of the product strategy. Marcel and Gonzalo explain the process they followed to make it happen and their challenges and wins along the way.

They will also share the business value this product offered to ImmobilienScout24 customers and how it helped ImmobilienScout24 leaders to see data as a product. 

Speaker: Larissa Günther (Thoughtworks)

Most accessibility guidelines and training advise you to integrate accessibility from the start into your project or assign all forces to making products accessible. But most of us are not living in a perfect world where we can just start from scratch and bake in accessibility right from the beginning with a team full of accessibility experts. How do we integrate accessibility in products that have already been in development for months or even years without considering accessibility? How do we get accessibility prioritized in projects with high delivery pressure? In this talk, Larissa shares learnings and challenges from getting accessibility onto a moving train of in-progress software development.