day 1: Monday, July 29, 2019 • 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Lex is currently a Product Designer focused on growth at The Black Tux. Her focus is on the impact of design rather than the output of design artifacts. Her work is designed to drive key metrics in the product like activation or revenue. As a result, Lex has a deep expertise in product analytics, early stage experimentation and AB testing - all of which she considers critical inputs to inform design decisions. This is also known as growth design.
Previously, Lex was the Lead Product Designer at Burner, leading not only growth design but also customer research, product analytics and experimentation. She worked on the commenting and prototyping teams at InVision. She has worked for Carbon Five, Neo and Kluge helping clients drive up conversion and reach new audiences. Notable clients include Toyota, Nissan, Macys.com, Deloitte, Prosper and Joyable.
Lex started a growth designers online community called GrowthDesigners.co which includes many resources, a Facebook group and thanks to Scott Christensen, a Slack channel. She’s currently working on a newsletter and an Instagram TV show aimed at helping designers get more involved in business.
Chetana is an experienced design leader and builder of high performing product design teams. She has deep expertise in consumer products and innovation with a focus on emerging markets. Most recently, as Design Director at Netflix, Chetana led product design for global acquisition & growth. Before Netflix, she was at Scribd, Yahoo, Pivotal Labs, and Pentagram designing and leading teams across the end-to-end customer experience.
Chetana is passionate about leading design for products that have a mission and vision close to her heart: media & content, education, wellness, well-being, society, food, productivity domains.
She teaches UX design at start-up accelerator programs like Whitespacecrew, DesignLab and has served on the education committee for the non-profit Inneract Project for over 8 years. As a certified Hatha yoga teacher, she volunteers her time teaching middle school kids at after-care programs. Chetana believes in living a life in balance, work as an integral part of it. She strives to lead with compassion and solving design problems for positive impact.
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As VP of Growth at Instacart, Bangaly Kaba oversees growth initiatives for the company, focused on building experiences that drive customer acquisition, retention and long-term engagement.
Prior to joining Instacart, Bangaly was Head of Growth at Instagram, where he was responsible for building products that increased the size of Instagram's user base around the world.
Before Instagram, Bangaly led the Facebook growth team responsible for how people make friends that helped build the social graph, and he worked at DirecTV's Digital Innovation Lab building apps that enable new ways to consume media.
Day 2: Tuesday, July 30, 2019 • 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Paolo is currently a product designer focusing on Growth at Dropbox. As a growth product designer Paolo focuses on creating experiences that are user-centered, performance driven and business oriented.
Prior to Dropbox, Paolo was leading design on the Growth team at Strava, the #1 fitness app for runners and cyclists. He previously founded Paylance, which helped freelance designers to get paid in a timely manner, designed web and mobile products in the field of adtech and started his career designing video games. He learned illustration & animation at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in NYC and the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan, Italy.
In his spare time he enjoys being a mentor and bringing others closer to the world of design with Inneract Project and Cascade.
Derek Collins is a Product Designer and Prototyper at Netflix for six years. In October 2018, Derek joined Netflix’s growth team. Before that, he spent most of his time on the mobile team, where he designed and prototyped mobile downloads and content previews.
With over 150 million customers worldwide, Derek feels lucky to travel around the globe for Netflix. He enjoys visiting new countries to meet with customers and learn about their culture.
As a product designer, Derek believes he has a unique opportunity to create intuitive and compelling experiences for customers while meeting business goals. Outside of work, Derek enjoys traveling, rock climbing, and building and collecting Legos.
DAY 3: wednesday, July 31, 2019 • 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Robbie is a Senior Product Manager at Intercom in San Francisco focusing on monetization and first-use experiences.
Prior to this he lead the mobile product team at SurveyMonkey, sold virtual unicorns as a Product Manager at Zynga, and was a consultant at McKinsey & Company. His writing has been featured in Forbes, Fortune, AdWeek, USA Today, and the front page of Reddit.
Elina is a first generation Chinese-American designer and photographer based in San Francisco. She has helped shape end-to-end user experiences for consumer and enterprise startups and Fortune 500 companies. Currently, she is designing for professionals around the world to find opportunities on LinkedIn.
As a mental health advocate and founding designer of a meditation platform Simple Habit, Elina’s work is rooted in self-empowerment, healing, and mindfulness. Her purpose is to create accessible tools and facilitate stories of positive change as a way to elevate, inspire, and connect humanity.
A master dabbler — Elina spends her free time practicing yoga, covering concerts for a music blog, and is currently learning to paint, produce music, and how to breathe. She holds a degree in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley.
Ran is a data-driven product designer who creates delightful user experiences through a user-centered design process. Before joining Amplitude as a Senior UX Designer, Ran designed user experiences at Marketo and Chartboost. She holds an MS in Computer Science from University of Maryland College Park where she focused on Human-Computer Interaction and Data Visualization.
day 4: Thursday, August 1, 2019 • 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Chris Gallello is a Product Manager at Strava. He's worked in the technology industry for over 8 years, across collaboration tools and social.
Chris began his career as a Product Manager on Microsoft Office Online, where his work ranged from onboarding to accessibility to data center infrastructure and helped him bulk up his design, engineering, and public relations skills. He then joine as their first PM, where he shipped products and features across every platform. He also learned a lot about hiring, mentoring a team, establishing new processes, roadmapping, and organizational structure. Finally, with Purple.pm, he was the solo-founder with an outsourced engineering team.
Chris is also a big fan of side projects. He created UXcheck.co while at Microsoft and it really helped him get his Imgur job, and led to him starting Purple. In the past few years, He has shipped Kitten Cannon VR on Steam, and started the AR/VR design meetup group in SF. You can check out more of his work on his website.
Dustin Nguyen is currently the head of photography growth at Adobe, where he leads growth initiatives for Adobe's flagship products. He began his career as an administrative assistant for a few years and fell into marketing by taking a contract opportunity in marketing operations, which later ended up being the beginning of a really engaging marketing career.
Prior to Adobe, he worked at Airbnb where he was leading engagement marketing for the guest experience and partnered with international teams to scale their marketing efforts in regions like APAC.
In his spare time, he enjoys knocking locations off of his travel bucket list, the most recent being the pyramids of Giza in Cairo, Egypt and his favorite of all time being winter time in Kyoto, Japan. If he’s not traveling, he’s often reading -- the current book on his nightstand being Why We Sleep.
Raghu currently leads design & video growth teams at Adobe. Raghu began his career as an engineer but has always been led by user focus and interesting non-traditional problems. This has led him to various roles over the years including that of a product evangelist, product manager, product strategy manager and data science manager.
Like with other roles over his career, focus on growth happened serendipitously.
While leading the product onboarding team for a new product (Adobe XD), Raghu took a different approach and built a multi-functional team across product and marketing to help new users be successful. Meeting Brian Balfour, made him realize that what he was doing was called “Growth”. After being an early Reforge alumni, Raghu now leads growth for Design and Video products at Adobe.
Outside of work, Raghu can be found hiking around the bay area and in Tahoe with his wife, gardening in his backyard and struggling to strum a tune on his guitar.
How can I contact the organizer with any questions?
Please email andi@cascadesf.com with any questions.
Can I purchase tickets for individual days?
Individual tickets will go on sale in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.
What's the refund policy?
Tickets are non-refundable, but transferrable to another attendee and available on a first-come-first-serve basis.
Although we anticipate that everything will go as planned, venue and speakers are subject to change.
Have a question?
Email Andi at andi@cascadesf.com
