Speaker Series

Overview

Each month Mozilla will host speakers from tech and related industries to address topics tied to our mission and to nearer-term business objectives. Broad themes for the later half of 2015 include:

• User-centered design
• Validated learning (build-measure-learn)
• Exceptional quality
• Disciplined execution
• Radical collaboration

Ideas for speakers are solicited from Mozillians on an ongoing basis using this speaker submission form. Preference is given to practitioners i.e. those with hands-on experience in their particular subject area.

The speaker(s) will present live from either our San Francisco or Mountain View office and be streamed to the rest of the offices via Air Mozilla and publicly archived for subsequent viewing. In 2H 2015 we're experimenting with a 9am PT / noon ET / 4pm UTC Breakfast + Cantina format, with North American Mozillians having breakfast and lunch while our European counterparts dive into appetizers ("Brantina = Breakfast + Cantina"). We encourage speakers to allot at least 15-20 minutes for Q&A. Typical in-person attendance is 30-50 with remote attendees ranging from 100-200; follow-on views are available to our thousands of community members and the public.

Program Goal

The Speaker Series is part of a broader program co-run by Internal Communications and Workplace Resources (WPR). Our goal is to engineer individual connection points and create compelling opportunities beyond day-to-day work for office-based staff to come together in our spaces (in most cases) to share an experience and interact with the those they may not normally work with. Face-to-face chats among people with different skills might spark new ideas, lead to new solutions or at the least, increase workplace camaraderie. Our ultimate goal is to improve performance, innovation and overall engagement.

Testimonials

• "Seeing speakers like this are really heartening to see at Mozilla. I think it will drive some really impactful change." -- September 2015
• "Bringing in subject matter experts from the outside help us push our sometimes-bubble-like thinking. It's very easy to get caught up in our own 'laws' and constraints but hearing best practices such as Hitten will help us open our eyes a bit more. I'm excited because his presentation was spot on and hopefully expanded our horizons a bit." -- August 2015
• "Really learned to think differently about a lot of things and also 'argument' differently when discussing new features or ideas. Always think about the user value, and how what you are working on will hinder or improve the user experience." -- July 2015
• "This felt like the most interesting speaker so far, perhaps because it was directly relevant to our day-to-day work. He was also quite a good speaker, which helps. Getting people to talk about areas where we think we could do better or use a different perspective seems like a good general strategy." -- July 2015
• "I love getting an outside perspective from an expert in an area. We spend a lot of time talking to ourselves so that outside perspective is awesome." -- May 2015
• "The talk was engaging and the Paris employees loved the 'Brantina' idea and felt more a part of the conversation." -- May 2015

Upcoming Speakers

Thursday, October 22 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC

• Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla
• Topic: Data As Empathy

To build products people love, you must understand those people. User research and user-centered design help get us there, but once we have a sense of how our audiences think and behave, how can we go beyond the anecdotal to extrapolate to the macro? What ways can we better understand the needs of millions of users who think, act and operate differently than us?

Our October speaker Frances Haugen will share from her product management and software engineering experiences with products used by millions of Google and Yelp customers. She'll help us understand how data - done 'right' - connects us to millions of users we don't know personally. And she'll outline what doing data right means for product development, and how product owners can build things their users love.

• Speaker: As both a Senior Product Manager, Software Engineer and Data Scientist for companies including Yelp and Google, Frances has worked at the intersection of data, design and humans throughout her career. An Electrical and Computer Engineering undergrad, Frances says she sees the world as comprised of hi and low cast filters.
• Host: Matt Grimes, User Advocacy
• Questions: Submit questions for Frances during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.

Thursday, December 3 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC + Air Mozilla

• Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla

• Topic: Optimizing for Uncertainty

The web is increasingly complex and dynamic. In the natural realm, 'complex adaptive systems’ allow for flux and change in tumultuous environments. Our December speaker will draw on these models to illustrate how modern organizations can decide and move quickly.

Mike will share how leading tech and product organizations are not simply adapting to increased change, but innovating and thriving in these dynamic environments by:

• operating around networks vs hierarchies
• distributing authority
• processing information effectively
• embracing structured and facilitated methods for collecting feedback and gaining consent on group action.

• Speaker: Mike Arauz is a Founding Member and Acting President at August, a New York based consulting firm that builds high-performing teams for the world’s most meaningful missions. Previously, Mike was a Partner at Undercurrent, where he worked with leaders of global companies to transform how their organizations work and thrive in the 21st century, including GE, Pearson, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Mike is also a co-author of the Responsive.org manifesto and a leading contributor to the global self-management and future of work movement.
• Host: Jim Cook, CFO, Mozilla
• Recommended pre-watch: Mitchell’s 2nd Portland Keynote on Decisionmaking
• Questions: Submit questions for Frances during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.
• Hashtag: #brantina

Previous Speakers

Thursday, September 24 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC

• Location: Mountain View + Air Mozilla
• Topic: “Should I put it on Yammer?”

How do you respond when people at Mozilla ask you this? Do you sigh, roll your eyes, let out a small resigned laugh? Most of us know that many seemingly-benign posts (this one now the stuff of legends) can sometimes devolve into a debate nobody expected, necessarily wanted or knows what to do with. Not always, but enough to cause some communications platforms to be feared by some and occasionally counterproductive.

This outcome, of course, is not confined to Yammer, nor is the behavior confined to Mozilla. Our September Brantina speaker, Deanna Zandt, has generously volunteered to speak with us about the neuroscientific dynamics of online communications. She’ll provide a deeper understanding of how our brains work when we’re engaged in online discussions which can help us communicate better, make better decisions, be more productive, and ultimately engage with more people driving richer, more dynamic outcomes.

• Speaker: Deanna Zandt creates and implements web strategies supporting civic engagement and cultural agency, drawing off her background in linguistics, advertising, telecommunications and finance. She’s worked with The Ford Foundation, Deutsche Telekom, Planned Parenthood, and Jim Hightower’s Hightower Lowdown; and has also advised the White House on digital strategy and public engagement. Deanna has been a regular contributor to Forbes.com, as well as NPR’s flagship news program, “All Things Considered” and is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN International, BBC Radio and Fox News.
• Host: Doug Turner
• Questions: Submit questions for Deanna during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.

Thursday, August 13th @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC

• Location: San Francisco + Air Mozilla
• Topic: Hiten Shah will share his ideas and experience with growth hacking, a scrappy marketing technique developed by technology startups, and how it specifically applies to Mozilla. Larger companies that embrace this approach (examples include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Airbnb and Dropbox) use creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to gain product exposure and grow their market share quickly.
• Speaker: Hiten Shah is cofounder and president of analytics companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg; he also advises startups.
• Host: Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
• Questions: Submit your questions for Hiten in advance here, or during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.

Thursday, July 23 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC

• Location: San Francisco + Air Mozilla
• Speaker: Tom Chi has worked in disciplines ranging from astrophysical research to Fortune 500 consulting to developing new hardware and software (web & client) products and services. He’s worked on large projects of global scale (Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Search), and scaled new projects from conception to significance (Yahoo! Answers from 0 to 90 million users). He also co-founded GoogleX, the semi-secret group responsible for cutting edge projects including the autonomous driving vehicles, contact lenses that monitor glucose through tears and balloons in the stratosphere that provide Internet access.
• Topic: Tom will talk about his approach to rapid prototyping using 'native' materials like paper and foam core to create and test experiences. Using this method, he has led teams to work more effectively and quickly, building state of the art (see above for examples) products as part of an ongoing innovation process.
• Host: Josh Carpenter
• Questions: Submit your questions for Tom in advance here.

Thursday, May 21 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC

• Location: Mountain View + Air Mozilla
• Speaker: Kate Heddleston, a software engineer in San Francisco, does a lot of speaking on the people-dimensions of software development and engineering management best practices. Her focus is on how software gets made, as well as on what it does.
• Topic: Kate shares her thoughts on the topic of onboarding new hires - what it takes to do that well, particularly in an engineering environment - and the 'team debt' that results when we do it poorly. Kate also shared some of the fairly immediate things individual teams can do to reduce the debt.
• Questions submitted to Kate in advance are here.

Submitting a Speaker Idea

We will give special consideration to speaker ideas submitted by Mozillians! Criteria for speakers is outlined above. Tell us how and why your speaker will appeal to a broad set of Mozillians here.