UXPA-UK January 2021 Event: Leading as Listeners

For our first event of 2021, we're looking under the hood at how we can be leaders in our digital worlds. Is it through collaboration? Is it building out a cross-functional team? Can we inspire through alignment? How flexible do we have to be?
What can we actually do as practitioners to help motivate and inspire in both research and design. Do we need to be part of a leadership team to be leaders?
We'll have two speakers who will each approach the topic of leading as listeners in their respective fields - Caitlin, who will talk about the ambiguity of designing in liminal spaces and Jaslyn who will talk about how research can lead the way in inter-company alignment.
Talk 1: "Building Alignment through Research " - Jaslyn English, Insights Lead at Fullscript
If you poke something and it is soft, you intuitively poke it again. If you poke something and it is solid, you'll leave it alone. A major barrier to alignment is the holes in a vision that means team members spend their time stuck on the same questions instead of moving forward to execution. Research can help solidify a story and make sure every function of a team has enough information to move ahead. In this talk, I'll walk through a case study of building alignment at my company by leveraging market and user insights to solidify the story and demonstrate the opportunity.
Talk 2: "Fashion, games and leading UX teams" - Caitlin Goodale, Head of UX at Drest
Caitlin is used to designing in the spaces between- from building language learning apps that teach through play, to developing creative AR applications that let users manipulate their real-world environment. In this talk she shares the unique challenges and lessons of leading a UX team in these liminal spaces, using real examples from her time at Drest, bringing together the worlds of gaming, startups and fashion to make showstopping user experiences.