DevConf.US 2021

It’s a common practice for designers to strive to stay at least one sprint ahead of development with their design work. We designers never want to be holding up development teams. At Red Hat, we have spent the last year challenging ourselves to go much further and build an Experience Vision that shows the user experience that we intend to deliver in 3 years. Why would we do such a thing? Building a 3-year Experience Vision has unlocked a number of positives for our design team: 1. It allowed us to avoid getting stuck on technical limitations when brainstorming what we could accomplish. Sure we might not be able to do everything in 3 years, but we could do mostly anything. 2. It has allowed us to build a North Star to build towards and ensure our continuous focus on the end-user. 3. It continues to serve as an excellent way to get new contributors to our portfolio up to speed quickly. 4. Having a plan that looks further out has given us the opportunity to plan our leap past competitors rather than simply catching up to them. In this talk, we will walk through the process we’ve taken to build our 3-year Experience Vision. We will detail out one of the fundamental pieces, Experience Focus Studios, which allows for Open contribution from all Red Hatters. Studios are run as design-thinking workshops allowing the teams to ideate, prototype, and validate ideas that ultimately shape our Experience Vision. We’ll share just how important it is for you to consider building an Experience Vision acting as a North Star that shapes the product that your users need.