# ITX Conference Insights: AI, Emotional Strategy, and Product Convergence

**Podcast:** Product Momentum Podcast
**Published:** 2026-07-08

## Transcript

I am excited today because we are having a special episode where we are talking about the ITX Product and Design Conference.
It's my favorite two working days of the year.
Here with us today to talk about the conference, Shannon, Kyle, and Dan, all from ITX.
The conference starts out with Workshop Day, right?
Workshop Day is on Wednesday.
Keynote Day is on Thursday.
We'll get to the keynotes in a little bit.
Shannon and Dan, you had a unique experience because you got to participate in the workshops.
We have a product track and a design track.
Shannon, start us off with what did you get out of the workshops?
Who ran them?
What was your favorite part?
I mean, right off the gate, first we had Dr.
Nazarene there, and I'm going to just plug in her book real quick.
We'll see.
had it ready to go the product delight framework uh first of all um i believe she's been on the podcast a couple times with both you sean and and dan uh more from a product side but this year we had her actually on the ux track which is really interesting um and part of that is um her whole spiel if you're not familiar with it is like um finding opportunities to elevate a product strategy and bring in delight and when we say delight we're not just talking about like funny animations right kyle i want to stick with you for a minute you're a marketer by nature right that is your role we focus on product and design but we encourage people from different disciplines to come in so yeah being from kind of like on the outside of the uh product and design world why did you enjoy this conference so much i think a couple things really stood out to me this year one is we had a lot of different speakers talking about ai And it felt like we've really been along a curve with AI in the conference content over the last three years.
And this year it's been more about like, okay, how do we actually apply this and what are the common activities or skills or approaches?
I think for me, like a bottom line on that was...
Using AI as a thinking partner is a really great skill to have in any role, marketing, design, product.
I think that we have a tendency to, especially when we're working with like enterprise level software, sometimes it's hard to get the opportunity to talk directly to your users.
So if you are trying to make decisions that you believe will benefit your users and you're using AI to help formulate those opinions, you aren't amplifying something that you do well.
right?
You're using it to fill a gap and we want to avoid that.
I think we all have a tendency to want to overcomplicate our work no matter what role we're in because we're thoughtful people.
We're problem solvers, especially when we work, even if we're not working directly in product.
We are back on the podcast.
We are going to do our second in our topics and product series, and we are going to profile the product and design conference that we just had, the Rochester Riverside Convention Center in Rochester, New York.
It was amazing two days of workshops, keynote talks, podcast recordings and spotlight sessions.
Dan today got to be in the guest seat.
So he was in the hot seat.
We had Kyle Fasati, our VP of business development.
We had Shannon Baird.
She is a senior UX designer who's been with ITX for a really long time.
We got to hear their perspectives.
Dan, get us excited for today's episode.
Yeah, right.
We're coming out of this conference two days, getting to work and talk with peers, getting to interact with some amazing thought leaders across product development and design.
So having this conversation with you, Kyle and Shannon was great because, you know, each of us had our own perspectives that we brought to the conference and being able to hear what everyone got out of it was really exciting for me and just reiterating how great a time we had.
Amazing two days.
Let's get into it.
Welcome to the Product Momentum Podcast.
I am excited today because we are having a special episode where we are talking about the ITX Product and Design Conference.
It was just held here at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center, June 24th and 25th.
It was an awesome experience.
It's my favorite two working days of the year.
Here with us today to talk about the conference, Shannon, Kyle, and Dan, all from ITX.
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Bumped.
Yeah, excited to be on.
All right, the conference starts out.
with workshop day, right?
Workshop day is on Wednesday.
Keynote day is on Thursday.
We'll get to the keynotes in a little bit.
But Shannon and Dan, you had a unique experience because you got to participate in the workshops.
We have a product track and a design track.
Shannon, start us off with what did you get out of the workshops?
Who ran them?
What was your favorite part?
Yeah, I mean, right off the gate.
First, we had Dr.
Nuzerine there.
And I'm going to just plug in her book real quick.
We'll see.
Had it ready to go, the product delight framework.
First of all, I believe she's been on the podcast a couple of times with both you, Sean and Dan, more from a product side.
But this year we had her actually on the UX track, which is really interesting.
And part of that is her whole spiel, if you're not familiar with it, is like finding opportunities to elevate product strategy and bring in delight.
And when we say delight, we're not just talking about like.
fun animations, right?
Like a fun loading state.
What she's talking about, what she's truly getting at is like how to understand where's the user's emotional state at with engaging with different products and figuring out how to tailor the experience to meet them at an emotional level, not just a functional level, but truly like where the user is at.
in their mental state with engaging with these tools.
And so her workshop was all about starting to go beyond just the features and the functional requirements of solutions, but actually starting to think about what are the different emotional capabilities that you're looking for.
within your product framework.
So we were all given test examples of different products.
Some people did like Airbnb.
My group, we did Microsoft Teams.
And then we dug in and we talked about like, hey, what are the functional requirements for this tool?
And then what are the emotional requirements that users need for the experience?
And then using that, we started to explore opportunities of what she describes as deep innovation is like.
bringing both the emotional context and the functional context together and offering a solution that will both be functional and emotional.
Because her whole spiel is like, if you bring both together, you're going to deliver a most powerful experience and a more impactful feature that users are actually going to use.
And they're going to think that the system and the tools that they're using actually care about them.
And that will keep them coming back and continue to use the product.
The concept of emotional requirements was awesome.
I think that was one of the first times that I'd actually heard about that when developing products, right?
Dan, you got to be in the product track.
Tell me about the two workshops and what your favorite parts were.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, so first it sounded like the design track was having a lot of fun.
A lot of leads after coming through the wall.
Us product folks were very serious business people.
Yes, I was in two tracks, one with David Ferreira.
And our focus there was on, OK, right.
AI, yeah, we can build and deliver stuff so fast.
But how do we actually make sure that we're building the right thing?
So, yeah, I think for me, the top takeaway and there's a lot of takeaways was four hours.
was about assumption testing and some techniques to use AI and think about assumptions.
Like one of the big takeaways that he had was, right, when he runs a prompt to check assumptions, he has the prompt to ask him like, okay, I'll give you assumptions, but you give me three first, just so that you're starting to think about it too.
And you're not taking the output of the AI on faith, right?
Like you're now engaged in analyzing it.
Yeah.
And then he had the concept, okay, maybe you have...
20 assumptions baked into a particular problem that you're going after.
Like not all 20 of those are, oh my God, if this doesn't work out, we're doomed.
But some of them are, and those are the ones that you need to test and you need to make sure like, hey, is this assumption correct?
Is this the right path?
And if not, okay, like let's abandon this and go find the next problem to solve.
So that was really an interesting way to structure something that I think is easy to overlook in the problem world.
Yeah.
And then we spent four hours with Rachel Komen on leadership.
And there, I think, you know, one of the biggest takeaways there is, you know, it's really easy to think about leadership as a thing that happens.
Somebody is in charge and they are leading.
Right.
You know, leadership with authority or loudest person.
And that's not the case.
Right.
Active leadership is as simple as, you know, being in a call and.
having the pain and speaking up and having the space to speak up, right?
Leading as a verb that you do, not an overall overarching principle.
I think there's a lot of power in that and empowering each person to be able to kind of have a stake in solving the complex wrongs that we solve.
I think the concept of leadership as a verb from Rachel was really fun to explore.
And also in David's workshop, learning about my assumptions when we go into building something or when we go into designing something or just like at the idea phase, when we had to list our assumptions about in the exercise, when they list the assumptions about some of the ideas that we had, one of the first things of the four people at my table that we came to realize was like, we all assume that everybody would like this right away.
Right.
So like one big assumption is that what we are, what we are building is going to be worthwhile.
And actually we need to validate that.
Right.
Yeah, I liked having Rachel Coleman in this year from a soft skills perspective.
So my team's in charge of like helping to select the content.
And it feels like everything's all about hard skills right now.
How to use AI, how to build this, this way, new framework, whatever.
And I think soft skills are so important in product right now.
So I was psyched that the team found Rachel.
If you haven't seen her TEDx talk, check that out because that was how we found her.
Kind of a sleeper pick, actually, I thought as a speaker, but she crushed it.
And the skills, the verb stuff was really cool.
You know, two of the things she taught that I really liked were how to heat the room up, how to create tension in a room, even if you're not the leader and how to cool a room down, how to how to set everybody at ease a little bit to to try to help keep conversation flowing.
And these are really.
specific and nuanced soft skills that I think, you know, the more we know those, the better we are at leading anything, product, design, whatever.
Yeah.
Kyle, I want to stick with you for a minute.
You're a marketer by nature, right?
That is your role, right?
But at this conference, allegedly, right?
At this conference, right?
We focus on product and design, but we encourage people from different disciplines to come in.
So being from kind of like on the outside of the product and design world, Why did you enjoy this conference so much?
Yeah, I think, well, I think a couple of things really stood out to me this year.
One is, oh, we had a lot of different speakers talking about AI.
I got to go there.
Someone's got to talk about it on the episode, right?
And it felt like we've really been along a curve with AI in the conference content over the last three years.
First was kind of like, whoa, this is magic and like, nobody really knows what to do with it, but like, cool, let's play with it.
you know, vibe code something or whatever.
Then the next year it was kind of like, okay, we got to do this in our work.
And this year it's been more about like, okay, how do we actually apply this?
And what are the common activities or skills or approaches?
I think for me, like a bottom line on that was.
Using AI as a thinking partner is a really great skill to have in any role, marketing, design, product.
And you talked a little bit about, Dan talked a little bit about how David was really keying on, put your own thoughts in.
Ali Ali from Dropbox also talked about that.
It sounds pretty simplistic, but someone said to me at one of the dinners, using AI is a little bit like 3D printing.
whips out a rough draft for you and it's kind of brittle and it's not really super functional.
But I think that respiration, you know, to sort of lose the analogy, that back and forth, that thinking partner stuff is really where we're getting our best outcomes in product design, marketing, sales, you know, across the board.
So I like that as a theme.
I think that really came through this year and was something that I took away.
Thank you for checking our contractually obligated to talk about AI Box.
I really appreciate you covering that for this episode.
We should have a little, we need a bell to ring.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
That's honestly a great segue into the second workshop we had was with, oh, that's Samson, who actually got into her framework called Her.
ironically enough.
And it's all about which we're going to get deep, y'all.
It's all about how are we making sure the products that we are creating and designing are not harmful for our end users.
And y'all are talking to the user experience designer in the room.
So sorry, y'all.
We're going to go there.
But thinking about the ethics of the data, the tools that we're using, and making sure we have a list of questions, which she gratefully outlines and went through like in the workshop to ask ourselves Like as we are creating these tools, questions like, you know, does like does this correctly represent the cultures and the context of the cultures who are using the tools?
Does it comply with the data discrepancies that we need to think about?
She gets like really into it.
And like that was something that me who I'm just getting into creating and designing AI solutions and I'm starting to develop my own expertise really gave me a framework to take a moment and think about.
Like, are we asking the right questions as we're designing these tools?
We had a great conversation with Labetta.
I love that she's just pausing to talk about the human aspect of this and, you know, the societal impact.
It's something that I feel is really overlooked in kind of the current environment.
So to have that voice there is really powerful for me as well.
Yeah.
At our TV spot, I called Ovetta Sampson a force of nature and she lived up to the hype, right?
100%.
She brought it.
Right.
This was the first year, you know, we've been talking about the workshops, but this was the first year where the workshops were exclusively run by the keynote speakers.
In the past, we've had different specialists come in specifically for workshops and had keynote speakers that only did keynotes.
So while we've been talking about the workshops, we've really been talking about concepts that kind of spanned both days.
But I want to talk about one quote that came up on keynote day, and it was from David Pereira, and it was, AI accelerates what you are already doing.
Right.
Dan, talk me through that a little bit.
What did David mean there?
Yeah, it's, you know, the concept of like amplification, right?
If you are disposed to not willing to talk to people, you know, sitting in your office and kind of puzzling it out, having AI to support is going to allow you to do that more and faster, right?
If you don't want to go and talk to clients, you can use AI to have pretend humans to talk to, you know, to kind of come up with direction.
Likewise, right?
If you are out there, you're investigating problems, you're interviewing users, it can make that more efficient.
So it doesn't necessarily take you from one skill to another.
It maybe makes you stay, the habits that you have now, it makes them bigger and more advanced.
I was reading an article in a different domain about, it was a flying article, but.
How is humans right?
We had there's kind of a privacy bias and the thing you learn first is the thing that really kind of sticks.
So, right.
And AI kind of pushes you down the direction even more and makes it even harder to unlearn kind of any bad habits you picked up.
And yeah, and kind of change how you're working.
Yeah, it's funny.
Oveda talks about AI loves to make frameworks.
But if you ever ask it, hey, where did this framework come from?
It's like, oh, I made it up.
So like half the time, the first output that comes out of these tools, you can't necessarily trust it at face value.
And you need digging a little bit deeper there.
Yeah.
I think that we have a tendency to, especially when we're working with like enterprise level software, sometimes it's hard to get the opportunity to talk directly to your users.
Yeah.
So if you are trying to make decisions.
that you believe will benefit your users and you're using AI to help formulate those opinions, you aren't amplifying something that you do well, right?
You're using it to fill a gap and we want to avoid that, right?
David's talk was awesome.
Kyle, did you have a comment there?
On David's talk?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think at times we tend to overcomplicate.
the sorts of impacts we want to make with our products.
And one thing I loved about David Pereira's talk and his perspective is really just boiling it down to the value you're creating and the simple metrics and the simple key topics that matter.
I think we all have a tendency to want to overcomplicate our work no matter what role we're in because we're thoughtful people.
We're problem solvers, especially when we work, even if we're not working directly in product, right, Shannon?
You and me work around it all day.
And I like the way he simplified things and really encouraged us to stay focused on what matters.
Yeah.
I want to close with a question for each of you, right?
Nazreen said that product delight is really like a mixture of how do you get this feeling of joy and surprise at the same time out of your users?
So let's talk about what delighted you the most about the conference and what are you looking forward to next year?
So, Dan, why don't we go with you first?
Oh, thanks.
I think, you know, one of the things that I found really interesting was the overlap in Rachel's talk.
And, right, she was talking about adaptive problems, right?
So the problems were, you know, that there isn't a solution that can be, you know, kind of a binary solution that Google plays based on your expertise, like their complex human problems and how to kind of go after me really to step back and understand the circumstance that are going around.
And how, you know, product discovery is the same thing.
And like, hey, actually the work that we're doing, you know, designers, engineers, product managers in figuring out what brings value, it's adaptive problem solving, right?
We're trying to figure out something that is not working well for other humans and bring value in solving it and try and make some money along the way.
And I think like that was like this really interesting kind of aha linking.
Yeah, this is all about, you know.
trying to make things better for other humans.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's great.
My surprise and delight moment was, you know, in past years, we've had people like Jesse James Garrett or Jared Spool, Rich Marinoff.
They really celebrated this conference because it's a product and design conference.
Historically, I think the impetus has been to bring those departments together.
Now, I think those roles are converging in this kind of natural, you know, the game board is tilting us all together.
towards unified problem solving and shared solutioning.
And I thought that really came through in a lot of the talks.
I mean, you guys called out, Nazreen Shangal is actually a product speaker, but she crushed it for the design team.
And Oveta Sampson didn't really talk about design in a capital D way.
She talked about it as thinking about what we're really doing here, which is maybe an even bigger capital D.
But, you know, I think that was a surprise and delight for me this year that you can see how product and design are converging and that it seems to be really working well for a lot of teams.
Our clients, prospects, ITX teams all got a lot out of it.
And it's happening more naturally now, which is great.
Yeah.
I'll piggy off of that too, Kyle.
I think with AI.
technology that is becoming more and more readily available.
You're hearing like designers like coding their own prototypes.
You hear product owners designing and coming up with their own solutions.
And we're seeing our roles just become more and more closely aligned and offering more opportunities to cross collaborate.
And that is where I feel like this product UX conference was like killer for me.
And that is that I got to work and meet directly with some of my stakeholders that I work with on a day to day and talk about these things and talk about the connection.
between these things and seeing what they're thinking, what I'm thinking, and seeing how these topics relate.
Like just the designing for delight, for example, where yes, Nuri is a product-focused speaker, but...
so applicable to UX and thinking about like how do you identify those moments of delay?
How do you know what are those delight factors for the users?
Well, that is where user experience can come into play, right?
And having a conversation with a product was like, we want to find more of these micro opportunities.
Well, let's partner with it and I can help identifying those.
It was such a great conference of topics that were cross-discipline where it felt like we could come together as one and talk about these strategies.
And these core topics are very much like in our day-to-day that we're solving for.
So it was really awesome to do that networking and just seeing the level of caliber that these topics brought to the table.
Yeah.
For me, I think starting with COVID, I think we've lost a little bit of like in-person career development, right?
And we wouldn't have been able to make the observations that we were making about the blending of these worlds.
And you could also say that any speaker could have gone down any track, right?
There was value for both distinct role sets, right?
With every speaker that we had, the opportunity to be there in person and the opportunity to talk with other people is really unique these days, right?
And we have a great setting.
We have a great time, great timing with the Jazz Fest.
So I look forward to next year.
still building in the same schedule, right?
Still keeping product and design together, right?
But I want to get more people there so they can experience in person, right?
The value of all of the topics that we bring in, right?
I think the number of people who said like, I didn't know who these speakers were coming into the conference.
But now coming out of it, I want to go.
I want to get on their LinkedIn.
I want to read the books they've written.
I want to read their sub stack, right?
Everybody got something that they truly believed was going to make them better at their job.
And not just like something pie in the sky, right?
Like, oh, okay, here's this big vision thing that I could do.
Literally, tactically walking into work the next day, I can change my way of working because I took the time to attend this conference.
Yeah.
Shameless plug, actually.
Thanks for saying that.
You know, the marketing team at ITX is working on building more events in cities like New York, Chicago.
I'm talking about doing something in Cleveland, smaller events, but bringing the same caliber of speakers, because I think there is a lot to get out of that.
And so, Sean, you didn't know that, but way to tee me up for a shameless plug.
If you listen in those cities, you should check out our events page.
Yeah, I think also...
we found a really creative way to talk about AI without making it the main subject of the conference, right?
Everybody sort of mentioned it, but nobody's talk was about AI, right?
Prescriptive on here's how you should use AI.
Prescriptive on here are specifically the risks of using AI.
It was all kind of like concepts around the edges of that specific technology.
Well, thank you so much for being with us today.
We really enjoyed having you on the pod and we'll get the same crew together.
in one year's time.
And we'll talk about the 2027 conference.
Love that.
Anyway, thanks guys for having us on.
Make that happen.
Thanks for having us.