Hugo Welke is a product designer and design leader with 15+ years of experience building digital products that scale. He led design through hypergrowth at companies including Canva and HubSpot, and is now focused on the intersection of AI and human-centred design. He believes AI gave everyone the same superpower — and that design thinking is what separates useful work from noise.

The cost of building software has collapsed, which means the next generation of internal tools at startups won't be built by engineers or designers — they'll be built by the people who feel the problem most acutely. This talk gives people-ops leaders the product design fundamentals they need so the tools they build actually work.

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What you'll leave with:

1. A working definition of product design that doesn't require a design background.
2. A validation framework they can run before they build anything — so they stop shipping tools nobody uses.
3. A diagnostic for "is this working?" — concrete signals to look at when a tool ships.