Speakers
Christina Wodtke
Christina Wodtke trains companies to move from insight to execution as principal of her firm, Wodtke Consulting, and teaches the next generation of entrepreneurs at California College of the Arts and Stanford Continuing Education.
Christina has led redesigns and initial product offerings for such companies as LinkedIn, Myspace, Zynga, Yahoo!, Hot Studio, and eGreetings. She has founded two consulting startups, a product startup, and Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design; and she co-founded the Information Architecture Institute. She’s the author of 101 Theses on Design, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web and her new book about OKRs, Radical Focus.
She speaks everywhere from conferences to universities to boardrooms, and opines across the internet, but most often on eleganthack.com.
About the talk
Design the Team You Need to Succeed
From Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, the lone visionary has been the tech industry’s model for creating impact. But it’s a complete lie. The complex software, smart devices and connected information environments we create require multidisciplinary teams. So we must spend a lot of time getting teamwork right, right?
Sadly, no.
Instead we rip job descriptions off the web, throw people together without preamble, simmer in passive-aggressive discontent until we eventually fire the person we’ve all been rolling our eyes at. Or worse, we avoid firing him until everyone good quits.
It’s time to give teams the same attention and craft we give our products. Christina will share the lessons from top companies in the Silicon Valley for you to take back to your teams. It doesn’t matter if you are a manager or a peer leader, these approaches will make your team thrive. Awesome products come from awesome teams, so it’s time to stop doing business as usual and design a team for impact.