Christina Wodtke
Start-up coach and author of the forthcoming 'Radical Focus'
Clearleft Says
Christina Wodtke is a Silicon Valley stalwart and regular on the UX and IA conference scene. We’ve been following her thoughts on OKRs (how Silicon Valley tracks outcomes) with much interest, and know her workshop on design thinking will go down a storm.
Radical Focus: Using OKRs to Accomplish Your Most Important Goals
Christina Wodtke has devoted her career to tackling monumental tasks. She’s helped grow companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, and the New York Times. Nowadays she works with startups and entrepreneurs, sharing her strategies for success and inspiring them to pursue big goals and outlandish dreams.
Christina knows how to inspire diverse teams to work together, going all out in pursuit of a single, ultra-challenging goal. Hint: It’s not about to-do lists and accountability charts. How do you get your team to commit to bold goals? How do you stay motivated despite setbacks and disappointments? And is failure ever a viable option?
Christina Wodtke will demonstrate how she uses _objectives and key results_ to help teams tackle and realize big goals in a methodical way, leaving nothing to chance. You’ll learn the beauty of a good fail and how regular check-ins can keep you on track to success.
Design Thinking for Innovation
Design is transforming business, powering new companies like Nest and AirBnB, and revitalising older ones like Google and Intuit. Design thinking and practices are tapped as a font of innovation by startups in particular. But how can you adopt this new approach effectively? Christina Wodtke, Adjunct Professor at CCA and Stanford Continuing Education, will take you through the science behind design thinking. In this workshop, participants will apply six key design techniques to creating a business. You will learn how to discover hidden insights in data, sketch out concepts, and co-create with customers an early MVP. As well, we’ll use design thinking to rapidly iterate on the business model canvas to assure your business is viable.
Workshop structure:
This is an extremely hands-on workshop: less lecture, more making. You will consume many post-its, markers and papers as you learn to:
- Pull actionable insights from user research so we understand what customers really want (and will pay for)
- Sketch concepts in order to cheaply iterate and test them before you build
- Work collaboratively with your team and your prospective user base
- Unlock your creative side so you can innovate beyond the next photo-sharing app.
Target audience:
This workshop is aimed at people who are in the early stages of a startup or thinking of starting one. Engineers, designers, business folks… this is a workshop for all disciplines, together. Bring your team!
About Christina Wodtke
Christina Wodtke trains companies to move from insight to execution as principal of her firm, Wodtke Consulting, and teaches the next generation of entrepreneurs at California College of the Arts and Stanford Continuing Education.
Christina has led redesigns and initial product offerings for such companies as LinkedIn, Myspace, Zynga, Yahoo!, Hot Studio, and eGreetings. She has founded two consulting startups, a product startup, and Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design; and she co-founded the Information Architecture Institute. She’s the author of 101 Theses on Design, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web and her new book about OKRs, Radical Focus.
She speaks everywhere from conferences to universities to boardrooms, and opines across the internet, but most often on eleganthack.com.