My next public speaking opportunity is just around the corner, and I can’t wait to share my thoughts about building digital workspaces for creative teams.
I’ll be at the Henry Stewart DAM Conference, in Los Angeles, Nov. 12-13, 2015.
This will be my third appearance at this conference series. Previously, I’ve spoken at the east coast event, held every May in New York.
Much of my new thinking has emerged from the Product Management intensive course I recently completed at General Assembly. This curriculum covered the entire scope of product development from concept, user surveys, wireframing, testing ideas, MVP’s, business canvases, working with developers, competitive landscape, scrum and a host of other great concepts. As a Product Manager, the entire arc of development through implementation is on your shoulders.
Of course, this is exactly what I’ve been doing just by figuring it out on my own. But that only gets you so far. What I needed — and what I got — was a conceptual framework and a new vocabulary to talk about the business worth of bespoke solutions.
I’m an insider — a user. I’ve been living in this Problem Space for much of my career, and my ideas about digital workspaces come firsthand from living and breathing the pain points of designers and creatives within an organization. So, talking to other users is insanely easy. Anyone involved with the day-to-day process of getting their work done, in any organization, can immediately grasp the powerful potential of a digital workspace built around their team’s process and needs. How could anyone working in this chaos not see it?
But I’m also an insider, a user. And talking upwards in an organization is a completely different conversation than talking to one’s peers. It’s an entirely different set of criteria. One must understand, and be able to express to business managers and decision makers, the operational and bottom-line benefits of investing in such an ambitious undertaking.
The conversation shifts to “how does this help the enterprise?”.
- Are we creating a sustainable platform that will support and unify cross-team creative development for years to come?
- How will it help the company execute its marketing strategy?
- How will any built system mesh with the company’s strategy for digital media management?
- Does it conform to information security standards (infosec)?
- Can we directly measure a return on investment?
- What are the implications for improving operational efficiency, and the bottom line?
These questions may be universal, but the answers are contextual for each organization.
If you’d like to hear more, I will be sharing some of these insights and more at the upcoming Henry Stewart DAM LA 2015 event in November.
See you there!