LBG’s Alberta Soranzo Joins the CanUX 2018 Lineup

The renowned service design leader makes her CanUX debut in 2018.

 W2: Designing Happy Design Teams
} Nov 2, 2018   8:30am / 3.5 Hours

An effective design team requires a multitude of diverse skills, and it’s impossible for any one individual to possess them all. How do you go about putting together a team that’s balanced, powerful and can work effectively with other teams? What is the right mixture of junior and senior practitioners? What skills, soft and hard, do you need to design and deliver outstanding products and services that support meaningful outcomes?

In this workshop, we’ll take a look at how to assess the skills of our colleagues (as well as our own) to best shape, inspire and lead a design team that works together (and stays together). A team where more experienced practitioners thrive and more junior ones are supported, mentored and enabled to grow, and where complementarity and teamwork are the foundations of success. You will learn:

• A different point of view on design leadership, and learn how to build and grow design teams happy
• Understand the traits of an effective design team.
• Tips and techniques on how to hire, motivate and keep design teams happy.
• Methods and tools (and a bit of science) to assess your team’s skill set, create development plans and support performance

 Our Eternal (Digital) Afterlife
} Nov 3-4, 2018   Time TBD / 35 mins

Much as we don’t like to admit it, users have an expiration date. Even in the best case scenario, where the product and services we design aren’t abandoned due to inertia or lack of interest, human beings stop being users when life ends. Or do they? More and more often what is left behind is a digital ghost, a unidimensional clone borne out the million of macro and micro-interactions that we generate digitally during our physical life.
We will embark on a wacky journey through the maze of novelties and oddities that surround the end of life, to understand how we can organize information and systems, and ponder those ethical and practical questions raised by physical death in the digital age.

 Speaker Bio: Alberta Soranzo

A firm believer that there’s always another way to look at a challenge, Alberta Soranzo has been hacking things to make them work better for humans since she was a child. An incorrigible nomad, she’s lived and worked in Italy and California and is now based in London, UK. As End-to-End (E2E) Service Design and Systems Thinking Director at Lloyds Banking Group, where she focuses on the creation and delivery of future-friendly, end-to-end B2B and B2C customer experiences and services that are insight-led and create value. She is excited about the possibility to make a real impact on the financial outcomes of people by looking after the big picture as well as paying attention to the very small things that, she says, ‘matter a lot’.

Unafraid of challenging conventions, Alberta puts people at the heart of her design process and contends that you should always under promise and then over deliver. In her natural habitat, she’s sitting on the floor surrounded by bits of paper and post-its or standing in front of a whiteboard with a handful of markers.

Prior to Lloyds, Alberta was the Experience Design Director at Tobias & Tobias, where she was responsible for the integrity of the agency’s experience design thinking. She has a long track record of leading strategic projects for global brands, including Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Deutsche Bank, RBS, BUPA, The Co-operative Group, EDF, Nuffield Health and T.Rowe Price.

When she’s looking to escape the world of UX, Alberta is a competitive ice hockey player, which in our eyes makes her an honorary Canadian. That detail however, may be offset by the fact that a close relative or her in-laws was part of the group that sold the original Winnipeg Jets to Phoenix.

For more info, you can follow Alberta on on Twitter @albertatrebla

*Image credit: Talk UX