Prepare to Design the Future
March 19–20, 2017: Training
March 20–22, 2017: Tutorials & Conference
San Francisco, CA

Becoming a designer founder

Lane Goldstone (Brooklyn Copper Cookware)
11:20am–12:00pm Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Bridging design, technology, and business
 Location: California East
Level: Intermediate
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)
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Who is this presentation for?

  • People in the UX field, including students, experienced practitioners, designers who work with startups in an agency or freelance capacity, experienced designers who are thinking of starting a company, and startup founders who are curious about UX practices at an early-stage company

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Familiarity with UX concepts (personas, user journeys, etc.), Lean Startup concepts (build-measure-learn cycles, microsegments, etc.), and startup culture and challenges (bootstrapping, growth hacking, etc.)

What you'll learn

  • Understand the career path from UX designer to startup founder
  • Learn how one designer founder has impacted an early-stage startup company
  • Explore real-world examples of one startup’s UX practices

Description

User experience (UX) designers add necessary perspective and skills to early-stage companies, which are often overweighted with technical and business expertise. UX designers’ aptitude for considering holistic systems, desire to understand human motivations, visual thinking superpowers, and dedication to validated learning make them valuable early hires for startups. Increasingly, designers are taking more strategic roles at early-stage companies, but founders with a background in design are still relatively rare.

Lane Goldstone shares her journey from consultant to entrepreneur and explains how having a background in design impacts her company, Brooklyn Copper Cookware, in order to inspire more designers to consider founding companies.

Topics include:

  • Why Lane joined Brooklyn Copper Cookware
  • Ways her UX career prepared her to be a designer founder
  • Consultant thinking versus owner thinking
  • What it means to be a design-led company
  • Examples of UX practices used at Brooklyn Copper Cookware
Photo of Lane Goldstone

Lane Goldstone

Brooklyn Copper Cookware

Lane Goldstone is the cofounder of Brooklyn Copper Cookware. Although she now identifies as an entrepreneur, Lane’s roots are in digital product design and construction. Since the early ‘90s, she has worked with teams at Philosophie, Kluge, Carbon Five, LUXr, Hot Studio, Liquidnet, Atomic Object, Cooper, Electronic Arts, and Microsoft on projects that span the digital era. Lane is a popular teacher and speaker on the subjects of user experience (UX), Lean Startup, Agile, and Balanced Teams. Lane’s recent speaking engagements include Design Briefs, the Balanced Team Summit, UX London, UX Week, Lean UX NYC, the Lean Startup Conference, QConSF, and Agile UX NYC. She has a broad understanding of UX practices in many settings and looks forward to sharing her journey from consultant to entrepreneur with you.