Roadmapping with Critical Thought

We’re discovering and taking on increasingly complex problems. Businesses want to deliver more value and faster. Roadmaps have become the fundamental tool to aligning teams in these efforts.

We’ve all learned how to structure a roadmap, but how do we figure out what to actually put on the roadmap? This session will dive into customer discovery and critical thought tools to evolve from a product owner publishing a roadmap to a team co-creating one together.

Learning Objectives
Discover benefits gained with collaborative roadmaping
Overview customer discovery & co-creation
Identify the nature of problems, predictable or research and development
Apply activities to facilitate team critical thought

From Ideas to Action: A Hands-On Innovation Workshop

Every innovation starts with a person and an idea—but most early ideas won't ultimately succeed. How do you quickly assess, refine, and validate an idea so it either gains traction or fails fast so you can move on to the next one?

In this interactive, fast-paced workshop, you’ll bring your own idea for a startup, product, or feature and work through a series of activities to:

1. Expand your perspective and add structure to your idea.
2. Explore new possibilities by generating ideas you hadn’t considered.
3. Assess desirability, feasibility, and viability to refine your concept.
4. Identify concrete steps to bring your idea closer to reality.
5. Tap into the collective intelligence of the room to accelerate your progress and maximize your experience at KCDC.

Whether you’re tech lead shaping a new feature, a senior developer with a side project, or a manager fostering innovation in your team, this workshop will equip you with the tools and insights to move from idea to action and help others do the same.

Engaging and Aligning Teams for Innovation

Innovation is a wicked problem; the viable solution is often unknown until it's in widespread use. This makes it difficult for developers, designers, scrum masters, and product owners to achieve shared understanding and determine how best to reduce risk, generate learnings, and increase the chances of an innovation becoming sustainable.

Drawing on over a decade of experiences with different teams, products, and industries, I will provide a high-level overview of how innovation initiatives differ from extending existing systems and share techniques to decompose tough problems, engage in critical thought, move faster, and increase the chances that innovators’ visions will successfully become a reality.

Learning Objectives:
• Awareness of how innovation is different than extending existing systems
• Gaining context through Impacts, Outcomes, and Outputs
• Analyzing Feasibility, Desirability, and Viability
• Moving to Action with Key Questions
• When to Iterate in Models vs. Code

Originally presented at Nebraska.Code() and Heartland Developers Conference in Omaha. It has been updated and revised with feedback and new experiences.

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

Products Powered by AI

As AI evolves faster than any previous wave of innovation, it is reshaping what’s possible in product design. Solutions and ideas that once were unfeasible may now be viable. But to take advantage of this shift, we must expand our thinking by embracing new solution design approaches rather than relying on familiar methods.

This session will help you re-evaluate past concepts and spark new ones by expanding your perspective with real-world examples and practical insights. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of what it means to design products with AI.