Davis leads the UX team at Shopify Plus, focused on creating meaningful and compelling experiences for some of the fastest growing brands in ecommerce. Prior to joining Shopify Plus she did design work for a variety of companies, from startups to global corporations.

When she’s not working with pixels or people, there’s a good chance she’s scoring a baseball game or having water-gun fights with her two daughters.

Three’s a party: How product, engineering, and design can work together effectively at scale

The way project teams execute when they’re small — everyone chipping in to get it all done — can lead to disastrous outcomes as they grow. Without clearly defined UX design, product management, and engineering lead roles, projects can get inefficient, quickly.

Come and get a better understanding of how the lead PM, UX, and engineering roles, the trifecta, can work effectively as your team scales. You’ll leave with a clear sense of the trifecta’s responsibilities, cadence, and activities across each layer of the product organization.

Bridging the gap with user story mapping
How can we bridge the gap between real users and tangible project plans? Story mapping is a team activity for understanding and documenting your user’s journey, while also generating a product roadmap. It is a tool for exploring user problems, creating a shared understanding in a diverse team, and planning sprints/milestones. Attend this workshop to learn all about story mapping and how to plan, facilitate, and tailor this workshop for your team’s context.

Darrin Henein is a designer, writer, photographer and video game developer. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a BSc. in Human Biology in 2008, Darrin started his own design studio before going on to work with some of Toronto’s start-ups (Polar, Wattpad). He’s since led a team of designers at Mozilla (Firefox) and currently leads a team of 30 designers at Shopify’s Toronto office.

Darrin also pursues other interests: he’s spent time teaching at the Humber College Business School, photographing weddings on weekends, and spent 2 years designing and programming the critically-acclaimed indie hit game Lastronaut, which went on to reach 1.5 million people around the world. Lastronaut was nominated in the Canadian Video Game Awards, listed in TIME magazine as one of the month’s best apps, and celebrated world-wide by Apple as an Editor’s Choice.

Lastronaut: Designing a Hit Indie Game

Darrin grew up playing video games—he never imagined that one day he’d make one of his own. In his talk, Darrin will share the journey of making Lastronaut—a game that went on to millions of downloads and critical acclaim. He’ll share how video games are made, his behind-the-scenes process, how and what he learned along the way, and some lessons that will help anyone not only start—but finish—the projects of their dreams.