It is time for another Balanced Team meetup for the folks in Los Angeles and SoCal. It is set on Wednesday August 20, 2014 at Fandango in Santa Monica from 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

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Instead of sitting down and listening to a few presentations, we have designed an activity for every attendee to participate in discussions and generate ideas together. Come prepared because it will be filled with plenty of conversations from people in the community sharing ideas, socializing, and offering insights from their own experience.

If you’re interested in Lean Startup, Agile, Lean, Agile UX, Lean UX, DevOps, Customer Development—and anything else that values multidisciplinary collaboration and iterative delivery of value—you’ll find this of interest.

To ensure the quality of the activity, this event is capped at 30 attendees. It is free and first come, first serve. Please RSVP at our meetup page and feel free to invite new folks to come along. We know that our diversity always makes the conversation more fun!

Many, many thanks to our wonderful sponsor, Fandango, for providing food, drinks, and materials!

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There has been a great deal of recent momentum with the Balanced Team folks. A clutch of long time members gathered recently for the Lean UX NYC conference followed up by a Balanced Team Salon hosted at Pivotal Labs. Several of us shared a desire to carry some of that energy back with us to the west coast. Initially this felt like a good opportunity to round up some of the BT friends in San Francisco for a night of cocktails and conversation. After a couple conversations among several folks we decided to change course, put some structure around it and turn it into a Salon.

Image courtesy of Jordan Presnick (@JordanPresnick)

Salons have proved themselves to be a lightweight version of a larger un-conference event. At this Salon in San Francisco we had several lightening talks recounting some highlights from the New York experience by Courtney Hemphill and Alexa Roman.

We then opened it up to our favorite tool for engagement – the fishbowl. We seeded the endeavor with a broad question open to lots of interpretation… What is Balanced Team? As there were several new faces, there was a good amount of fodder for the bowl that followed.

Idea Generation

The question that received the most dot clusters was the topic on everyone’s tongues: How does Balanced Team fit into organizations: top down or bottom up? For those of us that have confronted this problem, it was easy to surface the issues and throw around some stories of experiences and the learning that was captured from them. The one truth that we can all agree on is that it is invariably hard but always worthwhile. As to be expected, the secondary and perhaps more important component of the event was the time available for old friends to reconnect and talk about their work and passions.

A latent issue that at times would surface during the conversation was the lack of true balance in the attendees at large. We are all practitioners on the design and development side of the product creation process. The missing voices that have the potential to truly balance our work still felt either underrepresented or fully absent. The knowledge, needs, and ideas that come from those working day to day in the fields of ethnography, marketing, sales, business strategy, etc are critical components to the successful execution of ideas. I very much hope to see future Balanced Team events reaching further and further out into our extended networks to bring those voices to the conversation and ignite the future fishbowls with some lively discourse.

Here are some additional photos courtesy of Alexa Roman.

Balanced Team Salon SF

We’re pleased to announce a Balanced Team Salon April 24, 2014 at Carbon Five in San Francisco CA.

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Salons are becoming popular format in the BT community as they involve plenty of networking, short talks from people in the community sharing what they’ve learned and then a fishbowl – a collaborative, inclusive conversation that allows many people to get involved and share.

With quite a few people in our SF community coming back from an amazing day-long BT NYC Salon we thought we might bring some of that energy and discussion back home. Our talks will share some of the learning and intrigues from the Salon and Lean UX 2014 conference. And then we’ll pull out some of the more intriguing themes and topics that were discussed as starters for our fishbowl.

Please feel free to invite new folks to come along. We know that our diversity always makes the conversation more fun!

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AGENDA

6 PM – Food and libation
6:30 PM – Short Balanced Team intro
6:45 – 7:30 PM – 3 10-minute talks
7:30 PM – Fishbowl ideation introduced
7:50 PM Fishbowl voting
8 PM Fishbowl
Networking until close

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deLUX is happening again this year at SXSW!

Please join us March 7 for some beers & bites at sunset on the beautiful patio at Adaptive Path, followed by a short program from some of the leading practicioners in the Lean / Balanced Team community.

Program Starts @ 6:30pm. Short talks from:

• Jeff Gothelf, Neo Principal and author of LeanUX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience
• Jeremiah Gardner, Handcrafted Brands Principal and author of The Lean Brand
• Alissa Briggs + Raman Hansi, Intuit Innovation Catalysts and SXSW 2014 Speakers
• Chris Nodder, Interface Tamer and producer of Questionable Methods.

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