Conference Speakers

Christina has helped to grow companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, Zynga, and the New York Times, as well as numerous startups throughout Silicon Valley. She's the author of the business-fable book Radical Focus, a book which uses the power of story to build a new approach to OKRs, as well as the author of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, Pencil Me In, and the upcoming Continuous Feedback. Christina currently teaches at Stanford on the HCI program in Computer Science. She speaks worldwide about humanity, teamwork, and the journey to excellence.

Cindy is the author of Lean Customer Development: How to Build Products Your Customers Will Buy. She is also a principal design researcher for Microsoft's Cloud & Enterprise division, after spending over a decade leading interaction design, product management, and research for startups including Yodlee, Loomia, Kiss Metrics and Yammer.

Leisa is responsible for building a better understanding of users and customers at Atlassian. Before that she built and led teams who transformed public services with user-centred service design at the Australian government and the UK Government's Government Digital Service (GOV.UK). Before joining the public sector she was a freelance consultant and has worked with clients including Virgin Atlantic, BBC, SonyBMG, HSBC, The Economist, Drupal and the University of Surrey. Leisa tweets at @leisa and occasionally blogs at disambiguity.com.

Dan wrote the bestseller The Lean Product Playbook and he works with CEOs and product leaders to help them build great products and strong product teams, often as interim VP of Product. Prior to consulting he worked at Intuit, where he led the Quicken product team to record sales and profit. He also led product management at social networking pioneer Friendster, and was the cofounder and CEO of YourVersion, a TechCrunch award-winning personalized news startup. Dan began his career designing nuclear-powered submarines.

C. Todd has been tinkering and doodling since he was four years old. Originally trained as a scientist, he’s had job titles ranging from scientist, to engineer, to product manager, to designer, and even professor. He has recently served as the Head of Product & Experience at Workbar, Chief Design Strategist at Fresh Tilled Soil, and Innovation Architect at Constant Contact. He also serves on the adjunct faculty at IE Business School in Madrid, as well as Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). He is the co-author of both Design Sprint (O’Reilly, 2015) and Product Roadmaps Relaunched (O’Reilly, 2017).

Nir founded two tech companies and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is the author of the bestselling book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Nir is also an active investor in habit-forming technologies. Some of his past investments include: Refresh.io (acquired by LinkedIn), Worklife (acquired by Cisco), Eventbrite, Product Hunt, Marco Polo, Presence Learning, 7 Cups, Pana, Kahoot!, Byte Foods, Anchor.fm, and Symphony Commerce.

Mariah leads eight cross functional domestic and international product teams at Pluralsight. Under her leadership Pluralsight successfully launched its technology learning platform which today serves more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies which has led to a recent IPO. Mariah has spent her career teaching and advocating human-centered design. In 2017 she was awarded the Excellence in Product award by the Women Tech Council for her outstanding product leadership and success in promoting practices coupled with organizational and philosophy design for measurable business impact. Before Pluralsight, Mariah served as the Director of User Experience for Universal Mind, one of the largest independent digital agencies in North America and lead all user experience for AMC Health. Prior to that, Mariah served as a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design where she developed and directed graduate coursework focused on interdisciplinary collaboration.

Brant Cooper helps organizations big and small innovate. He is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Entrepreneur and has over 20 years experience helping companies bring high-growth products to market. His startup career includes Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, inCode, and many others. He has experienced IPO, acquisition, rapid growth, and crushing failure. Brant previously authored The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, the first purpose-written book to discuss Lean Startup and Customer Development concepts and he is the Co-Founder of Moves the Needle, which has advised the innovation practices of such leading companies as GE, Intuit, Capital One, ING and Cisco.

At Benchmark, Sarah invests in consumer businesses and the consumerization of IT. Prior to Benchmark, Sarah was a Partner at Greylock Partners, and a Product Lead for search, recommendations, machine vision, and pin quality at Pinterest. As one of the first 35 employees, her first order of business was to launch Pinterest internationally and close the Series C financing. Sarah then moved into product, becoming Pinterest’s founding PM for search and discovery, and launching Pinterest’s first search and recommendations features. She also led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hyper-growth.

Tom is the co-founder of Thington, a concierge for your smart home or office, which was recently acquired by Eero. Previously he was the Head of Product for the Yahoo incubator Brickhouse where he developed the pioneering location sharing project Fire Eagle. He’s also run a small R&D group at the BBC and developed products for UpMyStreet, Time Out, Jawbone, Nokia and many others.