Most product teams design for a user who does not exist.

That user is calm, attentive, technically confident, emotionally regulated, and free to make rational decisions. Real users open products while distracted, exhausted, aging, grieving, disabled, financially stressed, or being deliberately manipulated.

In those moments, ordinary product assumptions become dangerous. A confusing warning becomes an ignored warning. A buried recovery path becomes a permanent loss. A “frictionless” experience makes the attacker’s job easier. A feature that works perfectly in testing can collapse when the user is scared.

After two decades building technology and security for organizations including Apple, the White House, and Fortune 100 companies, Cat Karow confronted this failure directly when her mother was targeted by a sophisticated scam. It forced her to rethink how products should behave when users are not merely making mistakes, but operating inside an adversarial environment.

This session introduces the Adversarial User Journey, a framework for designing products around the moments when cognitive load, emotional pressure, urgency, authority, and deception distort normal behavior.

Attendees will learn how to:

• Identify where product flows assume calm and rational behavior
• Model fear, urgency, fatigue, and manipulation as product conditions
• Design warnings that interrupt action instead of decorating it
• Build safer defaults, recovery paths, and trusted escalation
• Test products under pressure, not only under ideal conditions
• Recognize when convenience creates leverage for an attacker

The next generation of product design will not be judged only by how easily users complete a task.

It will be judged by whether the product still protects them when someone else is trying to control what they do next.

1st Track

Product Teams: Leaders, Engineers, Designers & Workflows

2nd Track

Product Lifecycle: AI Augmentation & Automation

Session Format

Conference Talk
Keynote
Fireside Chat