Designing for your Product Vision

Tarek Sadi

About the Talk

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.

About the Speaker

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.

In his talk, he will showcase how they make ideas tangible and test them for best results at Blinkist.