Ben Sauer

Ben Sauer is a product and design leader, speaker, and author on the potentia...

Speaker fees:

In-person: £3k-£5k

Virtual: £3k-£5k

Topics:

Technology & digital

Future trends

Innovation

Ben Sauer is a product and design leader, speaker, and author on the potential of design, possible futures, voice technology and team culture.

From 2018 to 2020, Ben worked at Babylon Health, first as a Director of Design, and then Director of Product where he led a large team of 100 designers, clinicians, data scientists, and engineers on AI-based products worth $100m+.

Having previously worked at Clearleft, Ben has worked with organisations like the BBC, Pearson, Tesco, and TCS to raise their product game.

Some of his achievements include –

Redesigning the social network of a $100 billion dollar company with 400K employees (TCS)
Designing an app that won Apple’s Newsstand app of the year (Evo)
Designing a ground-breaking science journal (eLife)
Worked at the award-winning, design-changing agency Clearleft
Used information architecture to help a city save decades of time, and procure millions of pounds for digital transformation (Brighton and Hove City Council)

Book Ben Sauer

Featured topics include

Is the iPhone really a ‘phone’? Is Alexa really an ‘assistant’? Humans love to communicate by analogy. The way we describe new ideas both unleashes and limits their potential at the same time. In this talk, Ben will take you through the unexpected use of metaphors in our strange technological history. He’ll show you how important they are when you’re creating change or making new things, and how to strengthen your ideas with a better choice of metaphor. This talk is for anyone involved in innovation who is interested in framing their ideas successfully.

Organisations making software have become obsessed with speed. Methods like Lean and Agile have been adopted dogmatically: efficiency is the rule, and business leaders are lapping it up. What we may have forgotten, is that many of the innovations we rely on every single day weren’t created this way. In this talk, Ben will examine the problems of the modern production process, recap how some of our most important innovations really happened, and propose a way forward.

Consumer behaviour is changing faster than organisations can keep up: smart speakers have grown faster than smartphones. As we move towards a voice-driven future, what should designers be doing to stay relevant? In this talk, Ben will give some practical advice on being a part of the voice future.