Hatch Conference

Wolfgang is an award-winning design veteran with 20+ years of experience and a rare combination of design & product knowledge. He serves as Head of Design at Elli – A Brand of the Volkswagen Group. As a design leader in multiple Fortune 500 companies and highly funded startups, Wolfgang has managed global design teams and worked on products used by tens of millions of users in 190+ countries. Equipped with an entrepreneurial mindset, creative problem solving skills, and an excellent eye for detail, he drives product design & development and creates outstanding consumer & business products. In short, Wolfgang likes building products and simplifying people’s lives.

Human-Centered Leadership
Designing with the user in mind or following human centered design principles is thankfully often the norm nowadays. But what about the other humans involved in the design process? What about the designers themselves? Let's talk about how human centered design should begin with the human doing the design work and how it can make design leaders become better humans themselves.

Tarek leads design and research at Blinkist, building the destination for the life-long learner. Before that, he built the first design and UX teams at an e-com scale up and worked with a number of startups and larger tech companies at a design & strategy agency in San Francisco.

Designing for your Product Vision
Designers got their seats at the table and now have to live up to increased influence on building products. They share responsibilities with their peers from engineering and product to define the roadmap but come with the unique ability to push through the ambiguity of the early stages by making ideas tangible and testing them. At Blinkist, we use design to test our big “leap of faith assumptions” that make up our product vision and to guide our teams towards a common goal. This talk will present the setup and methodology behind this approach. We will cover how to adapt the design sprint framework to run what we call “Vision Sprints”. The purpose of this format is to explore strategic bets on a one to three-year time horizon, test the underlying assumptions with customers, and backcast learnings to today. Using this method, we were able to visualize where the journey is headed, and spark ideation lightbulbs, imagination, and excitement across our product teams.

Sarrah is a user experience design professional, speaker, and author with 15+ years of experience in design, development, and management. Since 2017, she has focused solely on leading, mentoring, and growing multi-disciplinary global remote teams in high-functioning organizations.

Building design systems that work for your whole Organisation
Design systems (DS) are not just for designers. A good DS provides a solid foundation for your organization, enabling product managers and engineers to make decisions without relying on constant feedback from you and your team. In turn, designers gain time to focus on exploring and solving more complex user problems. Based on experience and material from her book, Sarrah will walk you through the basics of building a design system. You'll learn how to define a design language that can be embraced across functions and establish a communication strategy that will rally support from key stakeholders and other contributors from across your organization.

Sebastian is a strategic designer who loves to design brand-shaping positive human experiences, drive business growth and accelerate positive futures. He hosts the podcast Designdrives where he interviews design entrepreneurs and progressive design minds who gained their experience in design cultures like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, Spotify, IBM, etc. In 2022, he founded Footprint, a company empowering companies and individuals to accelerate a sustainable future.

Creating product experiences for a sustainable future
Learn in which ways designers can contribute to moving businesses to innovations that transform the brand to be more sustainable and develop products and customer experiences that are more sustainable or even nudge more environmental-positive user behaviour actions. The talk covers both strategic aspects of stakeholder collaboration and facilitation but also concrete examples and methods and interactions that can foster digital products to be more sustainable.

Samuel Huber is on a mission to push Planet Centric Design to organizations of all kinds in his role as Strategy Director at Goodpatch, a global design firm that operates between Tokyo and Berlin. He has just completed a Ph.D. on the topic of strategizing as prototyping at the University of St. Gallen’s RISE Management Innovation Lab and continues to explore the interface of research and practice.

Prototyping for the Planet
80% of future emissions are already designated in the design phase. As designers, we must evolve our practices to not only create value for humans but also for the planet we live on. But how can you empower your organization to turn abstract strategic goals into lived practice at the product level? We need to move from egoism to ecosystems. In this talk, we explore how planet centric design enables people of all kinds to recalibrate the way they work to foreground stakeholders that have been previously underserved. We discuss how prototyping provides a shared language that can help us to solve wicked problems like climate change. Along with the four defining movements of planet centric design, we discover how we can get our own organizations to take an active role in the sustainability transformation.

Julia is a Designer Advocate at Figma with 10+ years experience in Product and Communication Design. She is passionate about helping teams work together to deliver amazing products that make an actual impact.

(In)consistencies in Design Systems
Is consistency really the north star of a design system, or can it actually even hinder user experience? Julia will explore the limitations with focussing on consistency within Design Systems and how we should embrace the mess to deliver user experiences that matter to the customers – not just to the product teams.

Janis Verzemnieks is Co-founder & initial Product Design Lead at collaborative branding platform Corebook°, currently serving as CEO. Latest clientele: Miro, Firefox, Crocs, Glovo brand.

Death to the brand guidelines PDF: How to design a corporate identity collaboratively
Future is calling for everchanging brand identity systems, multisensory brand experiences, and multiple touchpoints. I call this #Brand2025 because I believe the year 2025 is when fixed-format PDF brand guidelines will become a thing of the past and modern branding teams will reshape how culturally relevant brands will be made, managed, and scaled.

Sarmishta is a user experience designer, creative director and consultant collaborating with companies to uncover strategic opportunities and shape them into purposeful experiences for customers, organisations and teams alike.

The Power of Staying a Beginner
There’s no greater teacher than the curiosity-filled, optimism-pumped state of being a beginner to humble even the greatest expert, while holding the hand of the most insecure learner. Sarmishta Pantham will share how she stumbled upon unexpected inspiration for seeing the process of starting fresh as a continuum, how we might lean on it to navigate work in times of great change– and reshape our approach to work.

Melinda Jacobs is a gamification expert, tech entrepreneur and N7 paragon. She’s a geeky nerd who found a way to combine her love of games and her fascination with people’s behavior into an award-winning expertise. As the founder of the digital experience agency Subatomic, she’s helped companies and organizations develop interactive experiences that change behavior through play, games, and gamification for over 10 years.

The Danger of ‘Gaming’ the System
We’ll look at what gamification means for UX, what designers can learn from game storytelling, and why understanding system design is the most important thing we can take away from game design. We will explore the danger of designing for untethered metrics like daily engagement and why fun isn’t a value proposition on its own.