About Ryan Rumsey
Ryan Rumsey is the CEO and founder of Second Wave Dive, where he develops boutique leadership programs for professionals in the digital product and services industries. He has worked with product, design, and executive leaders from companies like Apple, Google, Atlassian, Lyft, Workday, ConsenSys, ANZ, and Vox.
Ryan has a hybrid background in interaction design, front-end development, and product management. Previously, he led digital product innovation and transformation at Apple, Electronic Arts, USAA, and Nestlé.
His life experiences include working on a farm and acting in a Staind music video. Ryan is a dad, partner, and massive fan of the Liverpool Football Club.
Workshop
Become a Business Savvy Designer
"As a designer, I am most comfortable in my work when I can anticipate the needs of others. I have methods and tools to familiarize myself with patterns of behavior, decision criteria, and interactions people have in their use of technology. But when business partners first began inviting me to meetings, I couldn’t anticipate what they would do. As a result, I was intimidated by the people in the room and by their conversations. I assumed it was all very important, complex stuff, and that I did not belong.” - Ryan Rumsey
Designers have the ability to influence outcomes in ways no other function can. We have the power to impact the professional and personal worlds we want to live in. To be recognized for these broader problem solving skills and level-up our value and impact, we need to improve our ability to communicate value in languages that are valued. More often than not, that's the language of business.
Designers, to mature our impact and value, we need to better anticipate the needs of our organizations, partners, and colleagues. In this talk and hands-on workshop, Ryan will detail pragmatic steps designers and design teams can take to develop business dialects, lessons he’s learned along the way, and how he applies these lessons to contexts specific to the particular places we work. Are you ready to level-up?
Participants will get pragmatic and applicable methods/tools for:
- Utilizing our design skills to learn more about the needs of the business
- Forming a model of how design creates, delivers, and captures value for your organization
- Connecting design objectives and measurements to business outcomes; providing a missing link to OKRs and KPIs
- Analytical storytelling for executives and trade-off decisions
Who is this for?:
- Designers who are looking for skills beyond their craft
- Mid-career designers working closely with product or business partners
- Design leaders looking to mature their organization beyond aesthetics and creative problem solving techniques