Caitlin Steele
Narrative is the Human Operating System
The Hague, The Netherlands
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Caitlin Steele is a design leader with over a decade architecting mobile experiences across complex digital ecosystems, and she's worked as a developer too. As Trello's first dedicated mobile design leader she shaped the company's cross-platform strategy, and at lululemon her work across the device ecosystem drove a 233% revenue increase for the mobile app over two years. Her experience spans startup innovation at MasterClass to enterprise-scale iOS and Android work at Atlassian, on tools developers use every day like Trello, Confluence, and Jira. A Certified OOUX Strategist, she has keynoted SwiftCraft with talks at Pragma and iOSKonf, and works on the human side of building software at Thoughtful Apes.
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Transit Lines & Touchpoints
Most mobile teams operate reactively: rushing to fix bugs, chasing platform updates, and constantly firefighting across iOS, Android, and web. But what if you could lead your team to work proactively instead? This talk introduces a mental model borrowed from urban transit systems that transforms how you think about multi-platform development.
Just as cities use buses for flexibility and trains for reliability, each platform has natural strengths. By mapping your product's touchpoints like a transit network, you'll learn to make strategic decisions about where to invest, how to coordinate across platforms, and when to let platforms diverge. This framework helped improve mobile team effectiveness from 45% to 89% at Trello, and it can work for your team too.
What you'll learn:
- How to identify your product's "transit lines" and stop treating all platforms the same way
- A practical framework for moving your team from reactive firefighting to proactive planning
- How to make strategic trade-offs between platform consistency and platform-native experiences
- Techniques for improving cross-platform coordination without sacrificing each platform's strengths
Focus: Leadership, Strategy, Team Effectiveness
How to Train Your Designer
Design used to arrive upstream. Now it lands in your lap half-formed, or from an AI that confidently gets it wrong. Fighting it or grinding solo both make it worse. There's a third move: one shared structure that gets better work out of a designer, or an AI. It's closer to how you already build than you'd think!
A new 45-minute talk (flexible to 30) for iOS and app developers at any level, whether they collaborate with designers or have ended up owning design decisions themselves. No design background needed. It's a talk with a worked example on slides, no live coding, and runs from my own laptop with just a screen and a slide advancer. The material also adapts to a hands-on workshop, which I'm happy to submit separately if that's of interest.
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