Leading XD Week
The Adobe XD team is a global design organization responsible for the user experience of most of Adobe’s products. Once a year, we gather all of our designers, researchers, engineers, and other team members together in San Francisco for a week-long event where we share our work, build our relationships, and plan for the next year. In 2014, I began the 3-month journey to an amazing event which included a welcome bonfire and grill-out on the beach, a hack-a-thon (aka charrette), a year in review (show-and-tell), as well as a fundamentals workshop day, and a 200 person team dinner. It is one of my crowning achievements while working with XD at Adobe.
The budget for this event was well over $300k and required the help from three of my talented coworkers, the 2014 XD intern cohort, as well as project specific help from nearly every one of the 173 XDers.
This project was massive during its development I reported directly to Michael Gough, VP of experience design at Adobe (currently VP of Design at Uber) and the board of directors. Planning included tracking budgets, finding and viewing many of SF's finest group spaces for something with character, ample space, and the ability to accommodate 200+ people on the internet, corralling dozens of presenters to prepare and refine their presentations as well as getting them to show up early to the venue to get settled and mic'd. Much of my role included anticipating problems and the needs of the hundreds of people who were on-site each day, working with bus drivers, caterers, IT teams, rental vendors, hotels, etc., as well as being the first in the door the each morning and the last out the door at night.
I have included as many pictures as I could scrounge up from the team which hopefully convey some semblance of how fantastic XD week was.
