How Product Owners and Designers impact human centred design

Kate Keep
Product Owner, ACC
Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Kate is a Product Owner working in the Digital team at ACC, and her team currently look after ACC’s Injury Prevention websites. Kate is also a Photographer, which keeps her eye for detail sharp and passion for excellence alive. She comes from a Contact Centre background which drives her dedication to continuously search for the optimal customer experience. Kate and the team are passionate about accessibility and building websites that are inclusive for all of Aotearoa.

Brad Millen
Digital UX Designer, ACC
Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Brad is a Digital UX Designer in Digital team at ACC. Before launching into the world of UX, Brad studied game design which sparked his interest in the way people interact, engage and perceive products. This helped to inform his ethos that you’re always designing with others in mind.

Talk description:

Working in a multi-disciplined product team can be daunting, but how can those relationships be built on, and what does that mean for your team, your stakeholders and the users of the product.

A UX designer’s role is to look at how a user interacts with the product at hand and identify where there are areas for improvement, while a product owner’s role is to streamline the execution of priorities to ensure an MVP is delivered. So what does it look like when balancing these two roles to benefit the end user?

We cover the journey of raising the customer’s voice to be heard in a cohort of users that felt particularly disenfranchised. This posed a challenge for the product team’s delivery and was further complicated by the business group we worked with being new to continuous improvement and delivery.

This talk investigates how the importance of relationship building between stakeholders, product owners and UX designers is integral to assumptions being challenged and the customers feedback to be heard.