Interactive Sessions
A guided, hands-on block where attendees actively do the work: co-create artifacts, make decisions, or practice skills—vs. passively listening.
Gaining Traction with Journey Management
Journey Management is surging because it links design to real business outcomes—but most orgs still struggle to build and scale it. In this session, practitioners trade wins, pitfalls, and practical plays for governance, tooling, and cross-functional buy-in.
Amit Kiran
|
Senior Journey Management Coach
,
TheyDo
Stop giving them Option C
Stop defaulting to C. In this talk, we’ll practice stating a strong POV, backing it with crisp logic, and choosing A when it matters—plus a few hard-earned stories on why mistakes are reps, not wrecks.
Paul Syng
|
Andrea Guertin
Vision Sprint: From Ambiguity to a North Star
Great teams create clarity. In this hands-on lab, we’ll run a Vision Sprint to turn a messy problem into a one-page vision, a single North Star metric, and a Now/Next/Later plan—grounded by quick lessons from Kroger and DICK’S—plus take-home templates to run it in a 1-day workshop or 2-week sprint.
Ian Pawelec
|
Group Product Designer (Director)
,
DICK'S Sporting Goods
Craft Your Leadership Plan
In this interactive session, Peter introduces you to a powerful tool he developed for his thought partnership clients: The 5Ps of Design Leadership Planning. You'll learn how it works, begin to create your own leadership plan with a provided template, and discuss how to apply it within your specific context.
Peter Merholz
|
Consultant & Author
,
Humanism at Scale
Curtain Call for UX Theatre: Toward Meaningful User-Centered Design
UX Theatre is when teams perform “user-centered” without real users or impact. In this roundtable, we’ll trade stories, unpack root causes, and share tactics to call out performative practices and build a culture of real learning, participation, and user advocacy across teams and leadership.
Tanya Snook
|
Workshop Alchemist
,
Spydergrrl Consulting
Design Sprints 2.0
A fast, practical intro to Design Sprints—why they work, how they save time and reduce risk, and the core steps. You’ll practice the moves and leave with tools and confidence to run your own.
Francis Alturas
|
Lead UX Designer
,
GoDaddy
Lead through change, one experiment at a time
Turn big ideas into small, confident moves. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll spot one team friction, design a low-risk experiment to improve it, and leave with a simple framework to keep experimenting through change—AI, constraints, and all.
Milena Tasic
|
Design Leader within Federal Government of Canada
,
Federal Government of Canada
The Influential Product Designer
You’re a strong designer—now become influential. Femke’s crash course on navigating ambiguity, making rational design calls, and building cross-functional partnerships to drive impact.
Femke van Schoonhoven
|
Design Manager
,
Gusto
The Agency View: What AI-First Really Takes
AI in design isn’t a tool you buy—it’s a practice you build. This session offers a human-in-the-loop playbook: assess maturity, triage where AI helps or harms, design controllable workflows, and measure real value (not vanity). Drawn from Architech’s cross-industry lessons—no hype, just patterns you can use now.
Nick Alexander
|
Darcy Reaume
Visible Design Leadership: Leading with Confidence, Clarity & Authenticity
Design leadership isn’t just vision—it’s presence. In this session, WSJ bestselling author Sheena Yap Chan shares how visible, confident leadership aligns stakeholders and drives innovation, with stories, reflection, and a practical framework to turn presence into influence.
Sheena Yap Chan
|
Founder
,
The Tao of Self-Confidence
Raise the Bar, Not the Burnout
Raise the bar without burnout. In this roundtable, we’ll define “quality,” trade practical rituals (coaching critiques, priorities > tasks, design QA), add safeguards so standards don’t backfire, and leave with a clarity-first playbook: shared standards, a simpler Definition of Done, and lightweight team rituals.
Natasha Green
|
Head of UX & Digital Innovation
,
National Relationships Office, Deloitte Canada
Leading with Journeys: A Decision Maker's Guide To Winning Product Roadmaps
A 30 minute presentation on how implementing a journey management practice has unlocked cross-functional collaboration, broken down siloes, and created connectivity across various functions of organizaitons
Khayyam Lasi
|
Journey Management Lead
,
Autodesk
