Speaking

The Mandel Creative team loves public speaking! Our talks are focused on inspiring creative and technical teams to unleash their potential for awesomeness. Whether delivering a keynote, moderating a panel, emceeing, or facilitating large-scale workshops, our focus is turning auditoriums and videoconferences into learning environments and transforming an audience into a community sharing an experience and a destination.

Favorite topics include: critique, collaboration, remote work, solving the right problems, inclusion practices for creative and technical teams, the “future of work,” and software development, product and design collaboration.

We are always game to bring diversity to your conference roster, event or panel, and happy to recommend other speakers to ensure a diverse program. We prioritize working with organizations that amplify and value representation for people of color, women and non-binary folks, and the LGBT+ community.

Want to see us in action? Check out the below to listen to some of our previous speaking engagements!

Everything I Know About Career Growth, I Learned in Queer Leather Relationships: Stanford Pride Summit 2024

Stay tuned for this 15 minute talk Billie will deliver at Stanford Pride Summit 2024, June 14-16 LIVE in San Diego!

Some tickets are still available for Stanford Alumni and allies: https://summit.stanfordpride.org/

AITA? Top 5 Mistakes People Make That Contribute to a Toxic Workplace and What to Do Instead: Chicago Camps Tent Talks (2023)

In this episode of Chicago Camps Tent Talks, Billie hones in on the 5 most common mistakes she’s seen well-intentioned people in tech make that actually end up contributing to toxicity in the workplace, and how to change those behaviors. This is a live Q&A, and includes a full transcript.

Unleashing Your Best Work Through Healthy Conflict and Feedback: UX Cake Interview with Leigh Arredondo (2023)

In this episode of UX Cake, Billie discusses the role of productive conflict in the workplace. Listen in to hear about how asking difficult questions, sharing divergent perspectives, and establishing a safe space for sharing individual thoughts, mistakes and gaps in understanding all contribute to building more creativity and innovation within organizations. Billie also outlines the importance of feedback in creating productive conflict, including practical tips on how to effectively engage in the three key aspects of critique, from soliciting, offering, and receiving receiving feedback.
This interview includes a full transcript.

Finding Our Way: Podcast interview with Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett, 2020

Billie met Peter and Jesse at a conference in the early 2000s, when UX practitioners globally counted in the four digits, and all of us were self-taught. We appreciate how they’ve used their platform to lift up peeps like us, from historically underrepresented groups.

We recorded this spicy interview in the fall of 2020, when Billie was freshly pandemic-downsized from her in-house role and beginning the patience-trying process of redesigning her life and livelihood. We love the authenticity Peter and Jesse elicited in this conversation, how they teased out the connections between Billie’s academic background as a multidisciplinary social scientist, experiences as an out lesbian leader in tech, and the ways she brings value to Mandel Creative’s clients and students.

Brand is Product is Marketing is Operations: Joint Futures 2019

Josh delivered this talk at the Joint Futures conference in Helsinki.
Learn about the keys to creating a truly intentional and conscious experience - you’ll need to pay the most attention to design operations, design systems, socio-cultural programs, the end-to-end employee experience, and more. In this talk we’ll see how people persist more than products, so you’ll learn proven methods for paying more attention to this layer. Especially at this critical moment in society and on our planet, now is a terrific time to focus on the integration and intersectionality of teams.

How to hire, motivate and inspire the next generation of designers: O'Reilly Design 2017

So grateful to the O'Reilly Design program chairs for the opportunity to speak at such a well-run conference, in such fabulous company! This video is Billie’s talk in its entirety. From the conference brochure:

"With the industry booming and fresh designers flooding the job market daily, the gap between education and employment has never been more evident. How can managers mentor junior hires to maximum effectiveness? How can junior designers stand out in the crowd? Billie Mandel explores the impact of strong mentorship in creating successful designers."

Application video for Stanford d.school Teaching Fellowship: From the "failed experiment" files

We teach our students, coaching clients, mentees and employees to show their mess, try things out, assess what did and didn't work — and we try to walk the walk ourselves. In 2016 Billie applied to be a Teaching Fellow at the d.school. The application challenge: what is a problem you think the d.school should be addressing, and why are you the right person to work on it? The catch: tell the story in ONE MINUTE. 

In her application, Billie focused on the story of Embodied Critique, diversity of perspective, and how she learned everything she knows about managing design teams in her Stanford undergrad women's self-defense class, and then recorded it… at 2:30. Then she cut and cut, one word at a time, and until it got it down to a minute. That one minute clearly didn't tell a sufficiently compelling story, since she didn't get the fellowship. 

Why do we include this here? This failed attempt ended up being a fabulous, powerful personal example of a storytelling lesson we teach our students. Observe the master editors, Hollywood screenwriters: what parts of their stories are emphasized visually or in dialogue, and what's left on the cutting room floor. The story arc and its impact changes significantly based on how thoughtfully you edit, and there's such a thing as paring down too much such that your meaning is too diluted to have impact. 

The part of this we’re still deeply proud of, and stand behind 100%: