Brian Zimmer
Chief Product Officer, Don’t Panic Labs
Lincoln, Nebraska, United States
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Brian has been an innovation leader at Don’t Panic Labs since its creation in 2010. He currently leads business development and product strategy, consulting with hundreds of businesses of all sizes and stages. Brian leverages a diverse set of experiences in blending software engineering, design thinking, and innovation processes to bring visions to reality.
Additional professional experiences include launching an IT consulting practice, investing in venture deals, and teaching as faculty at the Jeffrey S. Raikes School at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. Brian has a Master of Business Administration from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has attained agile certifications.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Demystifying Group Decision Making
We make decisions every day. Some effect just us and some effect others. We may make decisions on our own. Other times, we may choose or be required to involve others when making decisions.
Decisions are central to all progress, whether trivial or destiny changing. So why don’t we talk about how to make effective decisions as much as we talk about development methodologies and processes?
This talk will share a simple framework to understand three approaches for decision making (command, consult, and consensus), their inherent trade-offs, and how to effectively put them to use.
Solving the Wicked Problem of Innovation
Innovation is a wicked problem; the viable solution is often unknowable until you have found product-market fit. This reality makes innovation initiatives different from extending existing systems and challenging for designers, product owners, scrum masters, and developers to work together, achieve shared understanding, determine how best to reduce risk, generate learnings, and increase the chances of an innovation becoming sustainable.
Many frameworks propose that the best course of action is a product owner creating definition for a team to rapidly build and deploy the solution. But what if a little critical thought with your team could be the key to unlocking employee engagement, productivity, and overall success?
Drawing on over a decade of experiences from startups, early-stage corporate innovations, and mature product reinventions, we will explore tools of problem decomposition and critical thought that help us identify meaningful user-facing and technical problems to solve and achieve shared understanding about their importance and desired outcomes across multiple stages of the product lifecycle.
Co-Creation: The Key to Creativity, Engagement, and Impact
Teams have evolved from documenting requirements to creating product definitions with techniques like journey mapping and user stories. Our effectiveness has increased and we’ve become user-centric. But what if the way we’re currently using these techniques is actually holding us back? In this session, we explore how co-creation combined with these techniques and other critical thought models is what unlocks empathy, creativity, shared understanding, engagement, and more impactful solutions.
Learning Objectives:
• Understanding of Decision Making and Commitment (Command, Consult, Consensus)
• Leveraging divergent and convergent thought
• How to include co-creation within your team and process
• When to discover and explore with code and when to learn through models
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