Building Team Chemistry in Baseball & Technology
Making a great product isn’t really all that different than making a World Series run. In both cases, the organization must assemble the right mix of talent, motivation, independent spirit and willingness to be coached. The right combination of these qualities results in a team who moves faster, makes better decisions, gets to better outcomes, and has more fun. None of this is easy, but it’s do-able, and we’ve assembled some vivid examples of how to do it right (or wrong) from things we know well: design, finance, and baseball. We’re going to discuss the tools and practices that we use to ensure that our teams are talented and high-functioning, and we’ll draw inspiration from our own roles in assembling design teams at Cooper and in building mobile products at Thomson Reuters. What role do performance-enhancing drugs play in product development? Tune in to find out.
Presenters
I have spent my career trying to build great products while I have spent my life avidly following baseball. In my collaborations with Doug Lemoine our conversations seem to naturally flow back and forth between product design and baseball.
At SxSW I am thrilled to have the opportunity to continue the conversation with Doug and anyone else who shares an interest in what we can learn from how baseball teams tackle issues ranging from talent management to team construction.
Doug LeMoine is a lifelong baseball fan, and a Managing Director of interaction design at Cooper in San Francisco. Over the past 11 years, he's worked with companies large and small to create great products and services, build strong teams and organizations, and keep pursuing the interaction design equivalent of a World Series crown. Throughout, he's found ways to solve design and organizational problems with lessons from baseball, as baseball consistently provides visibility into immediate success and failure that can be hidden or muted in the corporate world. He's very much looking forward to sharing what he's learned, and to hearing from anyone else who has been tempted to refer to the lessons of sport when solving problems at work.
Tuesday, March 13
