Blog

TALK THE WALK

With great work culture comes great responsibility, and at ustwo we enjoy sharing our experience and methods with fellow makers and doers across the world. Attending and speaking at seminars and conferences around the world are things we value and prioritize. Here you’ll find a few of the best talks we've done lately. Enjoy!

Flat, fast and f*cked up!

Marcus Woxneryd, Founder, ustwo Nordics: Web Summit, Dublin 2015

Marcus has been a part of ustwo since the start, and here he talks about our culture. He unpacks our ongoing process of linking accelerating demand for short-term results with the longer-term opportunity afforded by building the right culture.

Product vs Craft

Juan Delgado, Technical Director, ustwo London: NewCrafts, London 2016

In this talk Juan explains how shifting focus from craft to product has affected ustwo. Every day, our teams are required to make trade-offs between what would be the best technical solution and the one that is right for the product they are delivering. Ultimately, we are paid to solve business problems – not to be perfectionists. Is it okay to deliver perfectly valid, beautiful code if it solves the wrong problem?

Embedded content: https://vimeo.com/167722776

The Startup Revolution

Joel Brydon, Head of Studio, ustwo Sydney: Vivid Sydney, Sydney 2015

Joel gives his Four Hard Truths About Agencies. This talk is a straight-talking scrutiny of the tough world of traditional agencies and their ability to

  1. Always get paid
  2. Create dependencies on themselves
  3. Know shit about actually releasing products
  4. Sell ideas that are cheap to come up with, but expensive to execute

So here’s a discussion about how to rethink the traditional agency business model with honesty, integrity and passion!

Embedded content: https://vimeo.com/136160277

The organization is dead!

Malou Adler, Head of Coaches, ustwo Nordics: The Conference, Malmö 2015

In this session on the future of work, Malou proposes a new kind of leadership, based on distribution and facilitation. Having a few people in a room making all the decisions is simply not efficient enough. Instead everyone in the company has to take part in the strategic decisions. Malou explains what it means to ustwo to be a ‘learning organization’. In school we didn’t always learn how to learn, but this is actually one of the most important skills to master as a company.

Wayfindr: Independent Travel for blind people

Umesh Pandya, Associate UX Director, ustwo London: UCD15 , London 2015

Ume talks about the user-centered design methods used to creating Wayfindr: an open standard setting the benchmark for audio-based wayfinding with the goal of empowering vision impaired people to navigate the world independently.

Creating a Culture of Learning

Heather Taylor-Portmann, Learning and Development Lead, ustwo London: All About People, London 2016

Heather shares practical advice for building an organisation that behaves more like a family and demonstrates the benefits of doing so. She explains why ustwo are so excited about change, why imperfect perfection matter and why it is so important to derisk giving and getting feedback.

Last but not least, this is a talk about how to help ustwobies navigate in a semi-flat, self-organizing organisation by encouraging a culture of JFDI (Just Fucking Do It) and WIP (Work In Progress).

Don't fail: Succail

Mills, Founder, ustwo: Creative Mornings, Sydney 2016

If you are looking for a crash course in ustwo culture and a peek into the quirky minds that founded ustwo, this talk is for you. Here is an unpretentious walk through ustwo’s projects with the message that there is no such thing as failure or succes. There is only a wicked combination of the two: Succailure.