Ben Sauer
Independent Product & Design Strategist

“Slow down to speed up: how efficiency is killing true innovation”

Organisations have become obsessed with speed in software production. Methods like Lean and Agile have been adopted dogmatically: efficiency is the rule, and business leaders are lapping it up. By pushing teams to release early and measure things, we’ve become over-reliant on shallow evidence for progress. Got a number to show off? You’re all set. Good reasoning has taken a back-seat to scientism. What we may have forgotten, is that many of the innovations we rely on every single day weren’t created this way. In this talk, Ben will examine the problems of the modern production process, recap how some of our most important innovations really happened, and propose a way forward.

Ben Sauer is a product and design leader, formerly of Babylon Health and Clearleft. He’s worked with organizations like the BBC, Pearson, Tesco, and TCS to raise their product game. He’s been speaking and training people all around the world, with a focus on voice UI for several years; particularly in how to rapidly design conversational experiences. Teams at Amazon and the BBC use his methods, and through O’Reilly, he’s trained folks at NASA. He’s also spent many hours at home removing the ridiculous things that his kids have added to Alexa’s shopping list.