Mike leads a multi-disciplinary team of designers and user researchers at Reed.co.uk, leading UK Job and Careers site. Previously he built up design and research organisations at Eurosport, Discovery and BT.
Mike is a champion of user-centred design, empowered teams and cross-business collaboration. He’s passionate about improving design maturity and transforming businesses, and customer experience, through quality product design.
Upcoming Talks
11 October 2023
Mike delves into Reed's ongoing and dynamic research program, which serves as the foundation for all product and design initiatives within the organisation. He shares how they enable continuous deep research by democratising user research in product teams and creating a regular cadence. This then allows the centralised UX research team to take on larger, more complex and strategic research initiatives. In this session you’ll learn how they’re:
- Enabling constant research in product teams
- Planning for agile processes
- Demonstrating research value
- Prioritising larger initiatives
- Communicating research for highest impact
Through these strategies, Mike and his teams have successfully created an environment where innovation, based on deep user knowledge, is at the forefront.
12 October 2023
Having more work than available people is a common problem in all companies. Democratising research is a way of helping product teams to do their own research so that research teams can help improve the overall quantity of research being performed. But it is not a free lunch - there are problems with democratising research as well. This debate will decide how teams should approach this subject going forward.
Moderated by Emma Roberts
Past Talks
13 October 2022
Learning about the latest and greatest techniques are great. But what really matters is how you get those changes implemented in your companies. This panel will discuss the main tactics for demonstrating the value of process improvements as well as tips on how to get buy-in at both a senior stakeholder level as well as within the product development teams.
10 October 2022
This talk will walk through an approach to building and retaining teams and how to identify early in the hiring process what to look for and how to build teams based on individual, product, and business objectives.
- Planning teams to optimise efficiency and future growth
- Team focus on user and business outcomes
- Structuring teams for both empowerment and cross-business collaboration
- Key tips and insights on the hiring process