Rosenverse
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Enterprise Storytelling Sessions

Gold
Monday, June 3, 2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Share the love for this talk
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
Speakers: Dan Willis
Link:

Summary

A highlight of the conference every year, the Storytelling Sessions are a set of five-minute talks from enterprise professionals who share their challenges, opinions, failures and successes.

Here are the storytellers for Enterprise Experience 2019:

- Stephanie Albright, Experience Designer, a story about cleaning bathrooms
- Spencer Icasiano, Product Designer II / UX Researcher, Care.com, a story about transitions
- Malia Nagle, Director, UX Research, PayPal, a story about two apologies
- Laura Nash, Senior UX Designer, Boston Consulting Group, a story about personas who think for themselves
- Jenn Noinaj, UX Designer, U.S. Digital Service, a story about stereotypes
- Ilona Posner, UX Consultant, a story about keyholes
- Malini Rao, Senior Manager, UX, Kronos Inc., a story about a fight

Key Insights

  • •

    Storytelling became widespread in conferences in the last five years to counter audience distraction and increase engagement.

  • •

    Audience attention varies drastically during the day; storytelling aims to combat mid-day and end-of-day disengagement.

  • •

    The concept of 'keyholes' illustrates how limited perspectives obscure important organizational context and cause unexpected conflicts.

  • •

    Professional expertise, like UX skills, doesn’t always apply in personal or emotional domains such as parenting, which require empathy and time.

  • •

    Moving abroad triggers emotional phases—excitement, frustration, acceptance, and adjustment—that teach resilience and growth.

  • •

    Organizational resistance can impede UX progress, but persistence, collaboration, and design thinking can bridge gaps between user needs and business goals.

  • •

    Apologizing openly and vulnerably can transform difficult relationships into productive partnerships in product teams.

  • •

    Personas can become more effective by adopting qualities from role-playing character sheets: accountability, conflict, temporary states, and evolution.

  • •

    Bringing authentic, even quirky personal interests into work can foster memorable and genuine connections.

  • •

    Queerness as a concept symbolizes embracing change and rejecting binary thinking, a principle that strengthens personal identity and innovation in UX.

Notable Quotes

"The more specific a story gets, the more universal the themes are felt by everybody."

"Outside of our keyholes lies information we’re completely oblivious to that can come to haunt us."

"No matter how good I am at my job, it doesn’t make me a good parent. What makes a good parent is time, love, compassion, and a sense of humor."

"Pushing my boundaries and getting out of my comfort zone helped me learn what I was capable of."

"Make an uncredible experience credible. That was the directive from organizational resistance to UX."

"In a fight, there’s a winner and a loser. But for a product to be successful, it has to work both for users and business."

"It’s never too late to apologize. And don’t be afraid to say, I’m sorry."

"Personas need to push back. Conflict makes for better stories and better products."

"When I let my outside interest in, I suddenly had really memorable conversations with people."

"Queerness is change. The power to shape that change is within every one of us."

Ask the Rosenbot
Allison Sanders
Operating with Purpose
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
John Devanney
The Design Management Office
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Harry Max
Priority Zero: Some Things are More Equal than Others
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Courtney Kaplan
Taking it to the next level: Career paths in DesignOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Jessica Norris
ADHD: A DesignOps Superpower
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Shivanjali M.
From Fragmented to Fluent: The Linguistic Approach to Research Knowledge
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Erin Weigel
UX Lessons from running more than 1,200 A/B Tests
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Catt Small
What's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Dagmara Kukawka
Tiny team, moonshot impact: Democratizing research across continents
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Jon Fukuda
All the Ops: Successful cross-functional collaboration
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Gillian Salerno-Rebic
From Insight to Impact: How JourneySpark Used WEVO Pulse + Pro to Drive a 50% Lift in Ad Engagement
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Caroline Vize
The State of UX: Five Lessons from 2021 to Accelerate Digital Experience in 2022
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
Prototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Greg Petroff
Design is the Differentiator: Bringing New Design Innovations to a Very Antiquated and Very Large Industry
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Shelby Switzer
Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Magdalena Zadara
Zero Hour: How to Get Far Quickly When Starting Your Digital Service Unit Late
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold

More Videos

Mark Interrante

"Current AI tools help summarize and sift large volumes of feedback into meaningful patterns."

Mark Interrante Harry Max

AI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)

July 11, 2024

Patrizia Bertini

"If you are not speaking to the CEO or C-executives about compliance and transformation, someone else will."

Patrizia Bertini

The (r)evolution of designOps: It’s Time to Think (really) BIG

September 11, 2025

Shan Shen

"The phrase card sort may not require translation itself, but the activity it represents certainly does."

Shan Shen

Translating UX Terms into Business Contexts

November 29, 2023

Adam Thomas

"Being data informed is not data driven—blindly following data can kill you, like the Challenger explosion."

Adam Thomas

Survival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way

December 6, 2022

Robin Beers

"Research is inherently a silo-busting activity because customers experience the whole, not just parts divided by departments."

Robin Beers

Research as a Catalyst for Organizational Transformation

March 12, 2021

Sheri Byrne-Haber

"Getting something accessible is a straight line; keeping something accessible requires process change."

Sheri Byrne-Haber

Accessibility at Scale

June 9, 2021

Joseph Meersman

"To me, sweating the pixel means paying attention to the details of interactions and keeping our eye on quality as designers."

Joseph Meersman

Sweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique

June 10, 2021

Deanna Washington

"Saying no with intentionality and clear guidelines creates clarity and focus."

Deanna Washington Bria Alexander Jon Fukuda Saara Kamppari-Miller Farid Sabitov

Connecting the Ops: Plenary Panel and Closing Circle

September 9, 2022

Aaron Stienstra

"Equal solutions still leave some people out; tailoring based on needs actually provides equity."

Aaron Stienstra Lashanda Hodge

Leveraging Civic Design to Advance Equity and Rebuild Trust in the US Federal Government

December 8, 2021