For more information and to RSVP, please visit our Meetup group.

Please write a topic (or two) of interest for today

• Embedding marketing
• Unicorns – what are they – do you need ‘em?
• Product owner teams – report from the field
• Live style guides first movement
• Timing of design thinking vs. lean
• Making vs. thinking: pace & vanity progress
• If our currency is shared understanding, let’s talk about quality & values
• Lane’s “learn to code” trip report
• Product manager vs project manager?
• Product manager/owner think they are the customer (no research)
• Care & feeding of the engine of construction
• How to effectively bring designers into Agile/Lean development?
• Convincing management to build NEW products that solve a problem (aka not Facebook for pets)
• Josh, Giff, Jeff should buy a makerbot
• Convincing management that user research is good when they are scared you won’t come off as experts (B2B)
• How do we assess what is the “minimum desirable things” that will convince users and/or sponsors?

You can see a set of photos from the event on Meetup.

Then you should fill in this 3 question survey now.

Don’t know what Balanced Team is about? Go read the history of Balanced Team and check out the Balanced Team 2011 and Balanced Team 2012 conferences.

Basically – if you’re into Lean Startup, Agile, Lean, Agile UX, Lean UX, Devops, Customer Development – and anything else that values multi-disciplinary collaboration and iterative delivery focused on customer value – you’ll probably find this of interest.

Discussion on further details will happen on the Balanced Team mailing list. You should join the mailing list too.

Thanks – and hope to see you at Balanced Team UK 2013.

Many thanks to our 2012 event sponsors: IDEO, Carbon Five, Mutually Human, Proof, Atomic Object, Sapient Nitro, Groupon, { New Context }, UIE and Lean Dog. The event was much richer for your support and participation.

Conference Partner

At the un-conference portion of the event, I facilitated an activity to collect learning resources the participants personally used and found helpful to broaden their skillset. Here’s the list for your reference and reading enjoyment!

Ways To Learn

• Pairing and working near pairs for getting context
• Find a front-end mentor so you’re not confused by what you read
• Code Academy, for an intro to JavaScript
• W3 Tutorials for getting unstuck with specific problems
• F orrst, a community of developers and designers
• nerdi.net, a web developer toolbox
• Rails Bridge, women coding together, power+energy
• Skillshare, esp. financial modeling for entrepreneurs with Taylor Davidson
• Stack overflow, for getting answers to code/dev questions
• Rails Tutorial, for learning rails
• Treehouse, Web training website with gamification elements (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby)
• Smashing Magazine (and books), general Web and design and UX and fontend dev
• A Book Apart, series for deep dives into current thinking
• Big Nerd Ranch, iOS programming
• UIE UI conference, full day workshops on UX critical skills
• UIE virtual seminars

UI/UX

• Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love, Marty Cagan, good description of team roles
• Rosenfeld Media books, esp Web Form Design book by Luke Wroblewski
• Google search “UX Design Patterns“
• The Noun Project for icons and vectors
• Twitter hashtag #ux for finding resources on topics
• Yahoo design pattern library
• The Non-Designer’s Design Book, Robin Williams
• Follow Mike Lane (@mlane) on Twitter. He posts lots of great design, UX and code resources

Typography and Graphic Design

•  Kuler, browse color combinations
• Dribble, show and tell for designers
• 300 Mobile Icons, Bill Reid, great for quick icons (could not find a link, sorry!)
• What the Font, figure out what a font is from a sample, explore fonts by characteristics
• FFFFound, inspiration, has a great mobile app
• Pintrest for design and typography inspiration
• Evernote, keep track of your audio, pictures and notes anywhere
• Behance, online portfolio site, use for design inspiration
• Gimmie Bar, good for bookmarking things you like
• Lost Type, great, free typefaces

Front End Development

• CSS Tricks, how to take advantage of CSS
• Scout, tool for Compass, SASS
• W3C markup validation service
• Burlington Web App meetups and demos (could not find link, sorry!)
• Vandelay Design, curated resources, mostly Web design
• Susy, CSS framework for responsive Web
• Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman, explains the philosophy behind modern web thinking
• Twitter Bootstrap, for basic web templating
• Bootswatch, bootstrap themes
• CSS3 for Web Designers, Dan Cederholm
• JavaScript, the Good Parts, short, sweet, JavaScript resources
• CSS Mastery, Andy Budd
• Hack WordPress templates to experiment with PHP, HTML, CSS
• Use Firebug to edit HTML/CSS of any page
• Use Sass, Haml for saner coding

The conference runs Friday evening, June 22 through Sunday afternoon, June 24 at IDEO’s offices at 626 W Jackson Blvd (thanks, IDEO!). See Lanyard.com for the conference schedule. We suggest that you book accommodations early, Chicago is full of summer conferences.

The theme of the conference is “Welcoming the Business Perspective to the Balanced Team.” At our last conference in 2011, Dale Larson gave an important talk, asking the group why there were no business people in the room. Who was selling and marketing all the great things we were designing and building, and why weren’t they a part of the conversation?

Together we will explore how the goals and activities of business, design and development can and should work together. We will move past the us vs. them thinking that holds us back. We will share ways for people with these skills to cross-pollinate within organizations.

The rough schedule is as follows:

• Friday afternoon optional event: Visit Chicago’s brand new not-for-profit startup community and co-working space, 1871, in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart
• Friday evening: Welcoming reception with food and networking (location TBD). Please try to make it to this, especially if you are new to Balanced Team, because we will help get you up to speed.
• Saturday morning: Several prepared talks
• Saturday afternoon: Fishbowl, then planning Sunday openspaces/unconference workshops
• Sunday morning: workshops
• Sunday afternoon: share outcomes of the workshops and close

Josh Seiden, LUXr “Balanced Team, September 2011”

Shawn Crowley, Atomic Object “Balanced Team Conference 2011”

Bo Campbell “Diplomacy, the greatest UX asset“