Digital Product Designer

An accomplished digital product designer and writer, Cennydd has over 10 years’ experience assisting and consulting with companies about dynamic design strategies. Most recently, he worked as design lead at Twitter. He is a published author, having written Undercover User Experience Design and writes regularly for A List Apart.

Erika is an experienced and skilled web designer and developer and has been working in the industry since 1995. She currently directs all research, strategy and information design practices at Mule. Proficient and dedicated to evidence-based decision-making and strategizing, Erika wrote a study on the topic called Just Enough Research, published by A Book Apart. She is a regular speaker on the topic of collaboration and design research as well as effective interface language, and currently leads discussions about the limits of using quantitative data to make design decisions.

Melissa Perri is a skilled Product Manager, UX Designer, speaker, and coach, who specializes in consultation work with product development teams around the globe. Melissa focuses on creating product strategies that satisfy users and drive business goals. She coaches Product Managers using two key questions to address the rationale and potential profitability of development projects:

- Should we build this?

- Why?

Melissa has created her own Product Management processes by drawing on valuable knowledge from Agile, Continuous Improvement and Lean Startup, and she teaches these through her consultation work and through workshops. She has worked with a range of clients including Spotify, Rovio, Valtech, Plated, Wayra UK, and Levo League.

After implementing these concepts into her own work as a Product Manager, Melissa began to teach through Skillshare, and later developed a Product Management curriculum using these key principles, for General Assembly worldwide. She has been invited as keynote speaker on these subjects for a number of events including QCon, Mind the Product, Lean UX NYC, Lean Agile Scotland, and Agile 2015. Before becoming a consultant, Melissa worked as a Product Manager and UX Designer at Barclays Capital, OpenSky, Capital IQ, and Conductor.

For a brief period of time, Melissa started a company in Italy where she learned valuable lessons about bureaucracy and risotto. Now, she is finishing her book The Build Trap, and is based in New York.

Giles co-founded a company called CXPartners in 2004, which has since grown to become one of the world’s foremost independent experience design consultancies. CXPartners works on creating next-generation experience design, and generates multimillion dollar revenue for companies such as Marriott, eBay and AXA. His highly successful book, Simple and Usable, has sold tens of thousands of copies in Europe and North America and has been translated into Chinese and Korean. Giles was previously President of the UPA, Co-Chair of IA Summit and UX Awards judge. He has also worked with the British Standards Institute, developing standards for web accessibility.

Stephen P. Anderson is the Chief Experience Officer at BloomBoard, where he is transforming how teachers grow as professionals. Once a high school teacher, Stephen continues to challenge and inspire people as an international speaker and trainer; he's presented at some of the world's largest organizations, teaching product teams about games, play, learning, interactive visualizations, and other fun topics.

Stephen is most recognized as the man behind the Mental Notes card deck—a tool that's widely used by product teams to apply psychology to interaction design. He also authored Seductive Interaction Design, which answers the question: "How do we get people to fall in love with our applications?"