We look forward to hosting you at D-Fifteen, Ericsson’s innovation and collaboration space in Santa Clara, for an evening of discussion on best practices for building products leveraging IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Typically, as companies build new products, the main focus is on technology best practices, but that approach has proven to be unsuccessful.

Join experts Steve Portigal, Adnan Boz, and Gretchen Anderson, who will each share user-centric and business best practices critical to launching successful products.

At this free event, you will have the opportunity to learn from experts, network with your peers and enjoy pizza and refreshments.

Speaker: Steve Portigal

The old maxim says we should “find a need and fill it.” While at some level that is certainly true, in this era of fetishized disruption, organizations seem to gravitate to being in the problem solving business. Steve will review several different mindsets for creating products and services, consider their benefits and risks and challenge you to go beyond a fixing mentality.

Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps companies harness the strategic power of insights. He is the author of the classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights  and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.

He’s also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations.

Speaker: Adnan Boz

A significant challenge for companies trying to adopt AI is the gap between the business domain and AI solution domain. On the one hand, the corporate strategists strive for sustainable profitability, but on the other hand, the AI technologists grind over problems like image recognition, prediction or recommendation engines. These are entirely different worlds. How come for some companies, the gap keeps widening, but for other companies, like Amazon and Google, the business excels behind high barriers for market entry?

In this presentation, you’ll learn the answers. We will look into how AI product managers offer unprecedented value to navigate their organizations through AI solution adoption and development lifecycle with ease. I will share lessons from a decade of work at organizations like Yahoo and eBay, and best practices acquired during consulting for companies in Silicon Valley.

About Adnan: Adnan Boz is a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the software industry. Currently, he is with eBay, where he drives the Artificial Intelligence, Experimentation and Personalization platform products. Previously, he led Yahoo Sports, Finance and Homepage News Personalization AI products. Silicon Valley-based AI consulting company Move to AI is his fourth and most recent startup. He is also teaching AI leadership topics at Stanford Continuing Studies.

Speaker: Gretchen Anderson

As the things we create get smarter, we need to adapt how we design and develop them.

Gretchen consults with clients to inform their product strategy and improve team collaboration skills. Her book, Mastering Collaboration is available from O'Reilly. She spent the first part of her career in design consulting for firms like frog design, Cooper, and LUNAR. Recently, she was Head of Design at PG&E, California’s largest energy company, she has led the design of the hardware and software of a next-generation surgical system,and served as VP of Product at GreatSchools.org.

Her past clients include Virgin Records, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, and Intel. Gretchen is a Bay Area native who left only long enough to get a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in History & Literature.