Blog-Posts

Bored with missing the fun US Balanced Team events? Want a one or two day UK Balanced Team conference? Then you should fill in this 3 question survey now. Don’t know what Balanced Team is about? Go read the history of Balanced Team and check out the Balanced Team 2011 and Balanced Team 2012 conferences. Basically - if you’re into Lean Startup, Agile, Lean, Agile UX, Lean UX, Devops, Customer Development - and anything else that values multi-disciplinary collaboration and iterative delivery focused on customer value - you’ll probably find this of interest. ...

Balanced Team 2012 Many thanks to our 2012 event sponsors: IDEO, Carbon Five, Mutually Human, Proof, Atomic Object, Sapient Nitro, Groupon, { New Context }, UIE and Lean Dog. The event was much richer for your support and participation. Conference Partner Diamond Sponsors Platinum Sponsors Gold Sponsors ...

Here’s a short video of highlights from the closing circle at Balanced Team 2012 in Chicago. Many thanks to Balanced Team member Anticio Duke (@onlyaduke) for filming and producing this video!

At the recent Balanced Team conference in Chicago, a popular theme was “broken comb people.” In response to the idea of the “T-shaped designer” who has deep expertise in one area and familiarity with many areas, Jared Spool proposed that modern teams require people with wider range of functional skills. At the un-conference portion of the event, I facilitated an activity to collect learning resources the participants personally used and found helpful to broaden their skillset. Here’s the list for your reference and reading enjoyment! ...

At the end of the Balanced Team conference in Chicago June 22-24, we formed a closing circle and asked each person to say one thing they would take away from the event. I’ve paraphrased peoples’ comments and organized them into themes for easier reading. CULTURE Qualities of a company that can produce good UX: Vision, feedback loops, culture (per Jared Spool) Design the organization for balance Process leads to culture, culture is established by leadership Culture is what you make it. Culture your culture Leadership matters Designing the product means you have to design the business, which covers the end to end user experience VISION ...

We’re excited to announce our next Balanced Team conference in Chicago! The conference runs Friday evening, June 22 through Sunday afternoon, June 24 at IDEO’s offices at 626 W Jackson Blvd (thanks, IDEO!). See Lanyard.com for the conference schedule. We suggest that you book accommodations early, Chicago is full of summer conferences. The theme of the conference is “Welcoming the Business Perspective to the Balanced Team.” At our last conference in 2011, Dale Larson gave an important talk, asking the group why there were no business people in the room. Who was selling and marketing all the great things we were designing and building, and why weren’t they a part of the conversation? ...

Balanced Team is sponsoring an evening event March 11, 2011 in Austin TX during SxSW interactive. Please join us for spirited conversation, engaging lightning talks, tasty drinks and snacks on the roof deck and a round of fabulous door prizes. Thanks to our fantastic sponsors, Adaptive Path, UIE, {new context}, Rosenfeld Media and LUXr! To register for the event via Meetup, please use the link below. RSVP

I started a roundup of blog posts created by participants in last weekend’s event. Let me know if you see more! Josh Seiden, LUXr " Balanced Team, September 2011" Shawn Crowley, Atomic Object " Balanced Team Conference 2011" Bo Campbell " Diplomacy, the greatest UX asset"

Balanced Team Conference 2011 A collection of all coverage and resources. General Presentations are up on Slideshare. Check out the #balconf search, and the Balanced Team channel. The Lanyrd page for the event has an overview of the schedule, speakers, and links to the coverage. Chris Nodder took great photos that you can find here on Flickr. If you took photos, please tag them with #balconf and add them to the photo group. People were tweeting funny and smart things - check out the Twitter search for #balconf. ...

If you’re interested in following along with the event, please check out these links: We’re on the Lanyard social conference directory. We’re streaming (and archiving) video from the event at UStream. Our twitter hashcode is #balconf Update: Please see the resources page for a full list