Web Directions Summit

WIP Chaos: Navigating Change With Cross-Discipline Collaboration

Chaos is inevitable in a WIP world. Regardless of how kickass your Figma components are, how well you’ve defined your milestones, or how sophisticated your architecture is, problems and humans change, and things rarely stay linear.

Trust us, here at Zendesk we know all about it. Changing requirements, confusing customer feedback, and staying siloed wasn’t working. Strategies that earned us early wins weren’t going to enable us for the next part of the journey. We had to do something.

So we employed new tactics to help navigate these trials and tribulations while solving gnarly customer problems.

What we’re trying isn’t conventional, isn’t without fault, nor have we landed, but the fruit it’s yielding is really surprising.

What are we actually doing?

We’re helping designers dig deep and comprehend technical hurdles so they can design with a realistic lens. We’re empowering developers to attend early morning customer interviews. We’re letting PMs close JIRA roadmap tabs and open Figjam instead to synth on research findings.

Want to learn more? Come and hear it from the horse's mouth: a designer, a developer, and a PM sharing stories from their perspectives. Learn how these tactics are shaping their world and how they might shape yours.

Beau Lidden, Rich Low & Oliver Reid

Beau is a Lead Product Designer at Zendesk, helping the Sandbox team think through and build a change management ecosystem for enterprise to mid-market customers. He’s also involved in shaping in-house systems that help other designers with their everyday work practices.

Rich is a technology and people manager with 20+ years of experience in product management, known for building better products and driving exceptional outcomes for customers.

Oliver works as a Staff Software Engineer at Zendesk, where he specializes in developing systems that capture change history in the customer configuration space. These systems enable features such as version history, diff view, and rollback. Oliver is also involved in creating platform applications that other teams can build upon.

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