Blog-Posts

We’re very excited to announce that the next Balanced Team event in NY will be a Sunday Salon on 4/13 at Pivotal Labs in Chelsea. On the heels of The LeanUX Conference, Balanced Team will hold a one-day synthesizing symposium to share ideas, socialize, and continue the conversation. The plan: gather everyone for brunch (Bagels! Mimosas!). Generate topics of interest. Split into small groups based on topic. Discuss in groups, and create a poster. Present a summary of the poster. Go home, chill out, enjoy what’s left of the weekend. (Or maybe head to the bar w/ your Balanced Team friends!) Plus a helping of the Balanced Team fixtures (Welcoming new community members! Fishbowls! Closing circle!) that’re starting to become community rituals. ...

Design can move the needle. It can drive sales, retain customers and impact referrals. To prove that design is driving business, you need specific, targeted data. We often test conversions by A/B testing two different layouts or copy variations. But, there is another layer to these metrics - the emotional resonance of design. Aesthetics can play a profitable role in customer interactions. Designers take great care in establishing and evolving a brand. Yet, we don’t have a strong rubric for measuring visual choices. ...

At the Balanced Team meeting in San Francisco, our program consisted mostly of prepared presentations. Because dialog and participation are so important to us, we reserved some time Sunday afternoon to solicit conversation topics from the participants. Over lunch, the group was asked to think about one or more “conversation topics you’d like to lead.” We collected these topics on sticky notes and put them on the wall. Each speaker briefly introduced the topic they wrote and then the group placed a pen mark on up to three of the topics they would like to participate in. (also called “dot voting”). The topics with the most dots were assigned rooms. People assembled in the rooms that interested them. The conversation hosts were encouraged to share back the outcome of their conversation with the group afterwards through a blog post and/or coverage on the event. ...

A great event for me, much like a great movie, is always characterized by its persistent effects on my daily thinking. I attended my first Balanced Team event in San Francisco 3 years ago and the caliber of people and quality of ideas generated made me sign up for the next event, held in Chicago the following year. Moses Hohman did an excellent job organizing that event and I came away with a renewed and heightened respect for the Balanced Team group. Continued learning and experimenting with our craft is what drives most of us and although Balanced Team is a self-organized and relatively loose network of connections, the learnings gleaned from congregating a group of diverse thinkers together have been outstanding. Recently Lane, Veronica and I sat down to gather up the reflections that we captured from each of you as participants and also from our personal experience organizing the event. Receiving such positive feedback from everyone ended up making the process quite a fun experience. We wanted to extend a huge thanks to all the folks that showed up to make the conference what it was. Thank you in particular to those of you that took the time to put together a presentation and/or facilitate an open space. One thing that make these conferences stand out for me personally and for many that attend is that it has a blend of structured and unstructured content. We tend to experiment with the ratio but realize that a component of each is critical to the knowledge sharing that is at the core of what the organization is. ...

Ticket sales for Balanced Team San Francisco 2013 are now open. The event will be held at Carbon Five in San Francisco, California November 2-3, 2013 with an opening reception November 1. Buy tickets on Eventbrite Submit a session proposal using this form For more information, see the event site.

Announcing Balanced Team San Francisco 2013. The event will be held at Carbon Five in San Francisco, California November 1-3, 2013. Save the date! Watch this space for more information, join our Meetup and Google Group to get involved.

On Saturday June 8th a group of poly-skilled developers, designers, researchers, academics, entrepreneurs and other miscellaneous product development folk got together in London to look at how to build teams that balance customer and business value using collaborative, iterative methods. Speaker list for Balanced Team London 2013 on Lanyrd We’ll be giving more details of the outputs from the event soon. Some of the areas we covered included: What is a balanced team? Collaboration hacks “Data with soul” not “Data vs. soul” Fostering relationships in distributed teams Managing stakeholders In the meantime you can see some photos and tweets from the event over on storify. ...

You’re invited to attend a Balanced Team event in London June 8, 2013 at MozSpace London For more information and to RSVP, please visit our Meetup group.

April 14 2013, a group of Balanced Team members met at the offices of Neo, NYC for a social gathering and mini-unconference on topics of interest: Agile+UX+Lean Startup. We enjoyed bagels and coffee and collected topics of interest which we then discussed in fishbowl conversation format. Below, please find a photo and a list of topics provided by the group. Please write a topic (or two) of interest for today Embedding marketing ...

You’re invited to a Balanced Team event at South by Southwest Interactive, Austin TX. Sunday, March 10, 2013. For more information and to RSVP, visit bit.ly/delux2013