Type

Workshop

Timing

9 October

- 9:30 - 12:30

Move fast, innovate and ship more

What allows teams to collaborate and successfully deliver innovative new products? We’ve all worked on projects where we wanted more time or funding – but what if there’s a more critical ingredient for success?
In the past 6 months, Microsoft’s PowerPoint and other Office teams have delivered more innovative new product functionality than in the previous half a decade – and without increased budgets or people.
In this workshop, we will practice some of the transferable tactics that you can bring to your day to day projects.

Type

Talk

Timing

10 October

- 9:30 - 10:00

Uncovering the unspoken

Most features are used by less than 10% of customers. The “but your competitor has feature X” is rarely why people switch products. Implementing the number one requested feature on your backlog is unlikely to drive meaningful usage or retention. So how can we figure out what customers really need?
In this talk, Cindy will explain some of the paradoxes in customer expectations. You’ll learn how to dig deeper for the “why” behind customer requests, how to identify the customer frustrations they never voice, and how to differentiate the deal breakers from the nice to haves.

Cindy Alvarez
Director of UX
Microsoft

Cindy Alvarez believes that design and development teams need to ask more questions, state more assumptions, and run more experiments. In her current role as Director of UX for PowerPoint, she recently led the design efforts for PowerPoint’s newly announced AI-powered Copilot.
She is the author of “Lean Customer Development: Build Products Your Customers Will Buy” and has taught the lessons from that book to dozens of teams within Microsoft, innovation labs within large enterprise organizations worldwide, and startups at varying stages of maturity.
Once her laptop is closed, she enjoys distance running, cooking, and thinking about behavioral economics.

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