Senior UX designer, Jess Carver, reflects on attending her second JAM conference as she awaits her flight back from Barcelona to Bristol.
JAM is a brilliant product conference originally based in London. I was lucky to attend their most recent conference in sunny Barcelona. The talks centre around candid conversations about building incredible products, like Monzo or Facebook. They’re delivered by a variety of disciplines and perspectives; product managers to designers to entrepreneurial founders.
There’s a few gem insights that I’m feeling really inspired to try in Zone’s various product teams this week!
🎥 Sharing a quick demo video of latest work
Tom Greever, author of Articulating Design Decisions, shared how he creates quick and dirty 10 minute videos demoing new features.
They are then shared on the #general channel. Anyone who’s interested in the project, but isn’t close to the detail, can get an insight into what the team is working on *and why*.
I can see how this could be useful for clients where we have multiple scrum teams, but also sharing knowledge throughout the agency.
👩🔬 Experiment days
Miriam Thomas and Marco Sousa, Product Designers at Facebook, spoke about how they use small experiment days to build a culture of learning.
They go through a process of:
1. capturing a big list of all the small ideas that could be implemented quickly and prioritise by impact
2. build it together as a team and demo to key stakeholders
3. run it as an experiment on the platform
4. and then learn from it
We’ve practiced a similar approach with a global domestic products manufacturer. We ran a small hackathon to improve the registration process for newly purchased products, where the idea of being able to take a photo of the product ID to identify it and hugely simplify the process was born. It’s gone through a process of experimentation on one of the one market sites and now has been rolled out to the other 50 as it had such a positive impact on the experience.
🙋♀️ Being visible and transparent
Lindsey Jayne, VP Product at Monzo, shared her learnings from her varied career in product — one of which was to make visible what you’re working on, even if it’s you.
She recommends:
- sharing your objectives with your team
- to get feedback often
- and then share the results of how you plan to learn from it
This is because it enables more candid conversations on what you are working on and why.
JAM really reflects my ethos and Zone’s approach on experimentation and working with clients to create product experiences that matter to their users. If this post has sparked your curiosity, JAM have tickets for their London event live now!
