DockYard Senior Strategist Samantha Schak will chair a day-long summit on the latest frameworks, techniques, and best practices for product leaders.
During the 2022 Austin Product-Led Summit, beginning Feb. 16, Schak will introduce all presentations, facilitate Q&As, and lead in closing remarks. The summit brings together more than 100 product leaders from some of the world’s largest companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, and CNN.
The summit will include discussions on topics ranging from remote product management for dispersed teams, projections for the future of product management, and how to use AI and Machine Learning to personalize customer interactions.
In addition to her role as event chair, Schak will moderate the Building Diverse Teams panel. Schak, whose efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion span several years, said the panel will focus on real-world scenarios of how diversity—or the lack of it—can make or break a product. The natural result of improving team diversity is a stronger team and a better, more robust product.
“Homogeny will just breed more consensus, and that’s not what you want in the creation of a product. It’s not going to get you the best idea or the best outcome that you’re looking for,” she said.
A diverse team reduces the chance that a product unintentionally harms or excludes a certain demographic, but managing a diverse team means learning how to handle friction. Schak and panelists from The Zebra, Chipper, GoDaddy, and H-E-B, will discuss what it takes for a product leader to build and maintain a diverse team. That includes learning how to accept and facilitate feedback or handle criticism as a product leader.
During the discussion, they will focus on three key areas: Self-reflection and recognizing individual bias, building and maintaining diverse healthy teams, and creating inclusive products.
The Austin Product-Led Summit will kick off on February 16, 2022 at 9 a.m. CST. The Building Diverse Teams panel begins at 9:45 a.m. CST. Find a full list of panels and register to attend on the event site.
DockYard is a digital product consultancy specializing in production-ready apps that scale wonderfully as companies grow. We offer a range of consulting services with capabilities in product design, full-stack engineering, project management, QA, strategy, training, and user experience (UX). For over a decade, DockYard has solved complex product challenges for visionary companies like Netflix, Apple, Nasdaq, and Harvard. We’re also dedicated to advancing open-source web development technologies, such as libraries and tooling built around the Elixir programming language. From idea to impact, DockYard empowers forward-thinking teams to build for the future.
