Workshop: Let's cut features!

About myself: I've been a product manager for 5 years at Google, and before that an early joiner at Shazam. I built a multitude of products, features, and more for various markets worldwide. My passion is in products that have a strong value proposition, slick and minimalistic interfaces, great experiences, and that generally make sense. Hence, I try to talk about product development and improvement regularly.

The Workshop:
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Adding features is easy. Taking them out is hard. A lot of time and words have been spent talking about feature proliferation, feature creep, and so on. Everyone has an example (or 10!) of things that are over-complicate and are an annoyance to use, that they would like to change or even get rid of if they could.

Designing the core use case is not trivial, and I propose to walk through a process to simplify an existing product through a very practical and pragmatic approach. We'll see how constraints prevent us from simply jumping ahead and kicking everything out. We'll discover what the original designers had in mind, and retrace their steps.

There will be 3 steps to this workshop:
1. I'll open up a suggestion list for people who signed up to propose products they care about and that they'd like to see simplified
2. After we collected ideas in the previous step, I'll open up voting on all the ideas
3. At Lift12 itself, we'll tackle the product that got the most votes, and walk through feature redesign/simplification over the course of the workshop

The format of the session at Lift will be that of a brainstorm, resulting in actionable items and UX mocks as if we were about to start implementing the changes we want.