Speaking
Speaking
Hire Tamara to Speak
Tamara is a dynamic and engaging speaker! I’d recommend anyone looking to learn about human centered design and how to best work with stakeholders, ask her to teach you! She’s a ninja-level expert in our field and it really shows in her presentations.
– Rebecca Destello, Research Manager, Facebook
The life-changing magic of corporate unclusterf**king.
You can focus on data and optimize processes all you want… but if your head honchos aren’t aligned and thinking like customers, your products won’t delight. Tamara’s fresh perspective will help you find and fix the real barriers to great design in your company.
Executive level expertise
Tamara brings 25 years of real-world experience, including first-hand stories from Amazon, Apple, Zillow and many other tech giants, plus dozens of tales from the front lines of the startup world.
Ideas you haven’t heard a million times
Tamara swam upstream until she found the core issues that keep most companies from delivering great products—most of which fester in the C-Suite. Tamara’s talks light up dark corners and show you things you can’t unsee, from the sacred cows that roam corporate hallways to the hubris that hobbles so many startups.
Three things you can try tomorrow
Tamara is intrigued by problems, but she’s fascinated with solutions, and she loves to share them. She also hates talks that aren’t useful or pitch something you have to buy. All of her presentations contain practical action items that you can take back to your company, team, or projects.
Tamara is an exceptional, forward-thinking, motivational speaker, thought leader, trainer, and consultant. Her approach is dynamic and engaging; her message confident, convincing and most of all memorable. She is the real deal – a UX veteran with years of practical experience helping improve customer experiences for Fortune 500 companies to scrappy early startups.
– Suzanne Boyd, Founder & CEO, Anthro-Tech, Inc. and Affiliate Assistant Professor, University of WA
Absolutely brilliant and charismatic, Tamara uses wit and humor with the deftness of a surgeon to communicate complex ideas and concepts in a way that is very relatable and understandable.
– Albert Holaso, Principal Design Thinker, Honeywell
Tamara is the kind of outspoken, electricity-stokking person that I can imagine succeeding in all kinds of difficult situations, and it was a delight to recently hear her thoughts on salary negotiation for women in the Seattle UX community. Tamara was able to outline a streamlined get-what-you-deserve strategy; provide tips for quashing second-guessing and self-doubt; and inspire a packed room. She is a speaker of candor and experience that would provide a unique capstone to any event.
– Erika Spoden, Senior UX Research Manager, IQVIA
Refreshing takes on familiar problems
All of Tamara’s talks are customized to your event and audience. Popular topics include:
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- Executive Alignment: How to inject user-centered thinking into the C-Suite without risking your life.
- U-Xray Vision: How to help everyone in your company see your products through the eyes of your customers.
- Personas and Alignment Personas: Practical lessons from 20 years of focusing on fake people to build products for real people, and an opportunity to ask an expert about your own persona projects.
- Blockchain User Experience, and Why It’s A Mess: front-line stories and advice from someone who has seen it all before.
- Career Badassery for Women: Not your typical talks on salary and titles.
- Workshops: Executive Alignment, Alignment Personas, UX Diagnosis & Repair
Upcoming Talks
March 2020
- Pariveda Solutions | Seattle (private event)
- Negotiate the Salary & Title you Deserve | School of Visual Concepts, Seattle (free public event, delayed due to COVID-19)
- UX for Blockchain: An HCDE Alumni Leadership Board Event | Seattle on March 23, 2020 at 6:00pm – 8:30pm (delayed due to COVID-19)
The evening will feature talks by four local blockchain experts, followed by a panel hosted by HCDE’s very own Tamara Adlin, focused on how the fields of blockchain and UX intersect.
April 2020
- Personas Workshop for international executives (private event, delayed due to COVID-19)
June 2020
- Practical Ways to Inject User-Focus into Your Strategy | Digital Content Next (DCN) Tech & Product Innovation Day
Watch & Listen to Tamara
Host Brian Walker and I talk about the evolution of the UX design profession, what it takes to get executives to truly understand their customers’ experiences and why the future of eCommerce may actually lie in reCommerce.
An hour of practical, atypical advice on salaries, negotiations, and titles. Full of classic hits like ‘be brave for 10 seconds,’ ‘job descriptions are big dumb bullies,’ ‘say the number and STFU,’ ‘UX people need to learn about how business works,’ and ‘titles always matter.’ Also, there are diamonds. Wait for it.
Tamara Adlin uses the power of user personas to align teams and help them develop better products. Tamara literally co-wrote the first book on how to develop and use personas. She has subsequently developed several practices that help teams align executives and other stakeholders on how to build genuinely customer-focused products and services.
Negotiating a salary or title in UX in general is not easy, a lot of people struggle with translating their value in UX into business metrics. So it can be challenging for anyone, but many women especially have other internal hurdles to jump. Research has shown that women are much more likely to discount their own experience and value when it comes to salaries and titles. Tamara has some really great, specific and actionable advice for you, and although we’re talking about women in UX primarily, a lot of this is applicable to anyone who feels they aren’t great at negotiating.
This is a story about facing unforeseen challenges that made me want to rip my hair out (and use that hair to smack my client). It’s a story about how Blockchain, in all its obscenely technical and ridiculously disruptive glory, flew into my airspace and hit me like a flock of geese hits a majestic airplane. It’s about how confidence reaches new peaks only to discover new valleys. It’s also a story about Blockchain, a technology that some think will be as big, far-reaching, and impactful as the internet. And why that may actually be true, and what that would mean for the people sitting in this room.
“We’re talking with Tamara Adlin, a persona pioneer, about a process for creating personas that not only aligns executives and stakeholders, but that also actually gets those personas used. Tamara’s honed this process over the last decade, and she shares with ‘alignment personas’ are, how and why she creates them, and how you can create them too. Plus, how to navigate this potentially political process that is fraught with danger!”
Tamara presented the opening keynote talk at the World Usability Day conference.
Host Brian Walker and I talk about the evolution of the UX design profession, what it takes to get executives to truly understand their customers’ experiences and why the future of eCommerce may actually lie in reCommerce.
An hour of practical, atypical advice on salaries, negotiations, and titles. Full of classic hits like ‘be brave for 10 seconds,’ ‘job descriptions are big dumb bullies,’ ‘say the number and STFU,’ ‘UX people need to learn about how business works,’ and ‘titles always matter.’ Also, there are diamonds. Wait for it.
Tamara Adlin uses the power of user personas to align teams and help them develop better products. Tamara literally co-wrote the first book on how to develop and use personas. She has subsequently developed several practices that help teams align executives and other stakeholders on how to build genuinely customer-focused products and services.
Negotiating a salary or title in UX in general is not easy, a lot of people struggle with translating their value in UX into business metrics. So it can be challenging for anyone, but many women especially have other internal hurdles to jump. Research has shown that women are much more likely to discount their own experience and value when it comes to salaries and titles. Tamara has some really great, specific and actionable advice for you, and although we’re talking about women in UX primarily, a lot of this is applicable to anyone who feels they aren’t great at negotiating.
This is a story about facing unforeseen challenges that made me want to rip my hair out (and use that hair to smack my client). It’s a story about how Blockchain, in all its obscenely technical and ridiculously disruptive glory, flew into my airspace and hit me like a flock of geese hits a majestic airplane. It’s about how confidence reaches new peaks only to discover new valleys. It’s also a story about Blockchain, a technology that some think will be as big, far-reaching, and impactful as the internet. And why that may actually be true, and what that would mean for the people sitting in this room.
“We’re talking with Tamara Adlin, a persona pioneer, about a process for creating personas that not only aligns executives and stakeholders, but that also actually gets those personas used. Tamara’s honed this process over the last decade, and she shares with ‘alignment personas’ are, how and why she creates them, and how you can create them too. Plus, how to navigate this potentially political process that is fraught with danger!”
Tamara presented the opening keynote talk at the World Usability Day conference.
Host Brian Walker and I talk about the evolution of the UX design profession, what it takes to get executives to truly understand their customers’ experiences and why the future of eCommerce may actually lie in reCommerce.
An hour of practical, atypical advice on salaries, negotiations, and titles. Full of classic hits like ‘be brave for 10 seconds,’ ‘job descriptions are big dumb bullies,’ ‘say the number and STFU,’ ‘UX people need to learn about how business works,’ and ‘titles always matter.’ Also, there are diamonds. Wait for it.
Tamara Adlin uses the power of user personas to align teams and help them develop better products. Tamara literally co-wrote the first book on how to develop and use personas. She has subsequently developed several practices that help teams align executives and other stakeholders on how to build genuinely customer-focused products and services.
Negotiating a salary or title in UX in general is not easy, a lot of people struggle with translating their value in UX into business metrics. So it can be challenging for anyone, but many women especially have other internal hurdles to jump. Research has shown that women are much more likely to discount their own experience and value when it comes to salaries and titles. Tamara has some really great, specific and actionable advice for you, and although we’re talking about women in UX primarily, a lot of this is applicable to anyone who feels they aren’t great at negotiating.
This is a story about facing unforeseen challenges that made me want to rip my hair out (and use that hair to smack my client). It’s a story about how Blockchain, in all its obscenely technical and ridiculously disruptive glory, flew into my airspace and hit me like a flock of geese hits a majestic airplane. It’s about how confidence reaches new peaks only to discover new valleys. It’s also a story about Blockchain, a technology that some think will be as big, far-reaching, and impactful as the internet. And why that may actually be true, and what that would mean for the people sitting in this room.
“We’re talking with Tamara Adlin, a persona pioneer, about a process for creating personas that not only aligns executives and stakeholders, but that also actually gets those personas used. Tamara’s honed this process over the last decade, and she shares with ‘alignment personas’ are, how and why she creates them, and how you can create them too. Plus, how to navigate this potentially political process that is fraught with danger!”
Tamara presented the opening keynote talk at the World Usability Day conference.