From Business to Buttons Conference ̶2̶0̶2̶0̶ 2021

Erika has been a strategic design consultant since the late twentieth century. She is the author of Conversational Design, and Just Enough Research, a cofounder of Mule Design Studio, and she specializes in helping clients improve their decision-making processes and establish collaborative, evidence-based design practices.

Jake Knapp is the inventor of the Design Sprint and a New York Times bestselling author. Jake spent 10 years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the Design Sprint process. He’s written two books, Sprint and Make Time, and has coached teams at places like Slack, LEGO, IDEO, and NASA on design strategy and time management. Previously, Jake helped build products like Gmail, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Encarta.

Shinichiro Tamaki first joined Nintendo as a programmer, but quickly changed into planning and design. His major project was co-creating a new gaming platform – a platform that not only would go on to sell more than 100 million units worldwide, but that also showed that games could be engaging and social experiences for the whole family, and that gaming actually could be a full-body experience, not just something for your thumbs. Tamaki-san has written two books on design, and today works as a consultant in Japan.

Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs and the author of “Escaping the Build Trap”. She believes the key to creating great products is growing great product leaders. Committed to that mission, she created the online school Product Institute, and she’s also teaching Product Management at the Harvard Business School. Melissa and her company works with executives worldwide to set up their product organizations, advise on product strategy, and grow product leaders into Chief Product Officers.

Brad Frost is a web designer, consultant, speaker, and writer located in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of the book Atomic Design, one of the most influential books on design systems to date, which introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems.

Margot Bloomstein is the author of Content Strategy at Work, producer of BrandSort, and principal of brand and content strategy consultancy Appropriate, Inc. Over the past 20 years, Margot has helped clarify content strategy for e.g. Al Jazeera America, Harvard University, Fidelity, Lindt & Sprüngli, Lovehoney, Sallie Mae, and Timberland.

In 2015 Mike Monteiro taught us how to present our work with confidence. In 2017 he taught us how to fight fascism. Now – after writing one of the most important books on design in the 21st century – Mike Monteiro returns to From Business to Buttons. He is not done yelling at you. Mike is the co-founder and design director of Mule Design. He prefers that designers have strong spines. He believes workers have a right to unionize and a responsibility to improve society. He’s done with your excuses.

Ghaida Zahran is a lead product designer at Netflix with over 12 years of experience in design at e.g. Change.org and ZURB. She works on design strategy and is responsible for Netflix presentation in partner contexts such as PlayStations and Samsung Smart TVs, where she experiments with different types of content recommendation strategies and algorithms to attract potential members. When Ghaida isn’t designing things, she can be found sailing around the San Francisco Bay in search of new restaurants to try.

Peter Merholz co-founded the legendary agency Adaptive Path back in 2001. A few years ago, he co-authored a book that has become essential reading for all design managers and executives. “Org Design for Design Orgs” is hands down the best book on the organizational, managerial, and operational challenges of building in-house design teams. What Peter does not know about building and scaling design organizations is not worth knowing.

Indi Young is a speaker, writer, and UX researcher. She empowers makers to know their problem space, and create inspired product designs through empathy and deep understanding of peoples purposes and variety of approaches. She is the author of two books, the design classic Mental Models and the newly released Practical Empathy. Indi is also a founding partner of the UX pioneers Adaptive Path (acquired by CapitalOne).