The Power of Design Sprints for Product Team
2019-10-29
6:00 p.m.
The Albany Club - 91 King Street East, Toronto, Ontario
Leah Oliveira
A 16-year communication and engagement professional, Leah Oliveira is also an intrapreneur passionate about helping organizations build meaningful engagement opportunities, collaborative cultures, and environments that facilitate growth.
Having worked in the private, public and non-profit sectors in multiple industries, Leah’s broad experience includes leading innovation change management, stakeholder engagement, government relations, and internal and external marketing communications programming, to name a few. The major thread of her career, however, was as a “change agent” and key proponent of moving organizational change, growth, and innovation forward, both formally and informally.
Leah is the co-founder and principal in a recently launched innovation consulting agency, AdaptiveX and a Toronto-based meetup, Toronto Design Sprint.
A self-identified learning addict, in addition to her BA in English Literature & Critical Theory, Leah holds multiple post-graduate and professional certificates. She recently completed a joint business and engineering Master’s degree Management of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Smith School of Business (Queen’s University), where her main research focused on the process by which organizations prioritize and solve complex business challenges.
Follow her on Twitter @LeahOliveira
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leaholiveira
Carlos Oliveira
Carlos Oliveira is an entrepreneur, facilitator, and innovation coach for both ventures and enterprise organizations. Carlos is passionate about helping teams make better decisions, building solutions that delight customers, and helping companies innovate at scale.
Offering 18 years of experience in strategic product development and innovation leadership, Carlos has strong expertise in applying design thinking, lean start-up, and agile practices within new ventures and corporate innovation contexts.
His broad entrepreneurial experience includes the successful launch and scale-up of a software technology company, ultimately leading to an acquisition exit by OpenText in 2011. A serial entrepreneur, Carlos recently launched a corporate innovation firm, adaptiveX.
Over his career, Carlos has led and supported significant engagements with top brands, including Scotiabank, Rogers Communications, TELUS, Bell Canada, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, TDSB, Konica Minolta, and many others.
In his spare time, he co-organizes the Toronto Design & Innovation meetup and (formerly known as Lean Enterprise Toronto). He’s recently launched a new meetup through adaptiveX called Toronto Design Sprints.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/2carlos/
Speakers: Leah Oliveira and Carlos Oliveira
Today, product teams are under pressure to be more creative, innovative and delight customers sooner, but lack the knowledge and skills to know where to start. Agile product teams have frameworks and methods for rapid feedback, but generally, lack real data from real users to make good business decisions. As product release cycles run longer and longer, team members lose enthusiasm and focus on the customer.
As a tool, Design Sprints offer Agile teams an effective and transformative formula for testing ideas with real people, whether you’re on a small team at a start-up, scale-up, or inside a large portfolio of projects at an enterprise organization. Within five days, teams move from idea to prototyping/testing, to better business decisions, ultimately saving time, effort, and energy over the long-run. Join Leah Oliveira and Carlos Oliveira, co-founders of AdaptiveX, as they introduce both the business side (Leah) and technology side (Carlos) of design sprints for product teams, a process for rapid experimentation and learning that helps teams solve big problems and test new ideas in less than five days.
Originally created by three partners at Google Ventures, the process has been proven at hundreds of companies. Both Leah and Carlos have been involved in many organizational transformations and have run dozens of design sprints for the Fortune 500, witnessing how product teams can harness the power of design sprints to focus their efforts and deliver more appropriate solutions to market sooner.
Agenda
- 5:30pm-6pm: Welcoming and Networking
- 6pm-7pm: Conference
- 7pm-7:30pm: Discussion and Networking
- 7:30pm: Dinner
Presentation only is free for members and $10 for non-members, presentation and 3 courses dinner is $40 for members and $55 for non-members.