Samuel Mikel Bowles

Samuel Mikel Bowles

Vice President, Mutually Human, USA

Wasted Experiences — Going Lean Without Sacrificing Delight

Over time engineers have developed best practices and tools for identifying and managing technical debt, designers must do the same. Design debt can be just as dangerous for the businesses we work for and yet it is often ignored as teams transition to lightweight methodologies like Agile, Scrum, Lean, or Kanban.

Shorter iterations do not automatically lead to better outcomes. Lean UX can leave in it's wake a wasteland of broken experiences littered with tumbleweeds never to be swept up. In this presentation Samuel Bowles will tell stories, and provide practical tools from his experience applying Lean principles to reduce waste while preserving delight.

As Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, rightly warned—Lean methods improperly applied “cause a variety of problems”. In this talk we will explore a number of these pitfalls and potential solutions for how we can avoid them as a balanced team of designers, developers, and business stakeholders.

Presentation to be downloaded: PDF (45 MB)

About Samuel Mikel Bowles

Samuel is Vice President of Mutually Human. In this role, he is responsible for implementing, managing, and growing the company's software practice, including sales, talent recruitment, and strategic initiatives.

Samuel also contributes his expertise as an adjunct instructor for Kendall College of Art & Design and the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technologies. He serves as an advisor to Chicago-based health-care startup, Human Practice, and speaks internationally on how Agile and Lean can be applied to the practice of user experience design.

I believe this talk would be relevant to your attendees because it explores how designers and developers can work together more effectively. It specifically explores the concept of „design debt“ as it relates to technical debt and tools that can be used to reduce the negative impact it can have on the software we create.