Samantha Soma

GE invests over a billion dollars a year worldwide to develop people at every level of the company, from executives to interns. GE Digital's UX Leadership Program (UXLP) was created to identify and support the development of early career designers through an accelerated two-year, rotational program that provides curated curriculum, personalized mentorship, and technical coaching to position them for greater impact in their careers. Don't have the resources or bandwidth to create an early career leadership program, or want to help all members of your team grow? Samantha Soma, GE's UXLP program manager, will share her strategies for growing UX talent at GE, and how you can use them to facilitate development across multiple levels of your team at the same time.

No matter how long you've been a design leader, understanding how you and your team function, together and separately, is a core design skill that impacts your collective ability to work effectively and strategically.

This experiential, hands-on workshop explores how individuals engage in and experience design team dynamics, and offers you tools to articulate, understand, and change what’s not working in your leadership of your team. Through a combination of exercises, group work, individual and shared reflection, you’ll gain a better awareness of your collaboration style and triggers, as well as gain insight into how your design team experiences working with you.

Wherever you are in your UX career, this workshop will help you understand how you work with others, give you an appreciation of whom you’re designing with, and provide tools that help you focus on what you can design together.

During the workshop, you will: -Develop skills that help you and your team perform better on your current and future design projects. -Learn to recognise the potential underlying reasons of why people act out, and how you can respond constructively. -Cultivate the same level of appreciation and empathy for your colleagues as you have for your users. -Use experiential design techniques, intentional engagement, and self-reflection to discover, explore, and extend the strengths you bring to your team.