Join Candice Digby, Co-Founder of Austin Design Week and Partnerships and Events Director at Vapor IO, as we kick off the Product and Design Track.

We're often lumped into two categories: creative or technical. But we're here to prove that wrong. With the combination of art and tech, new categories are possible! From making high-quality media accessible to all to helping creatives focus on the essential parts of their roles, we'll use real examples of how creativity + tech play together at soona. We'll walk through what's possible with the combination of these two arts and give you tips on how to incorporate them into your work.

Lean startup and user-centered design philosophies hold that businesses should first focus on the user and all else will follow. But the cost and specialized nature of technological innovation means that entrepreneurs are often already invested before they are able to fully explore customer needs. This is especially true for "spatial" technologies-such as augmented reality, Internet of Things, and robotics-which allow access to novel, unfamiliar users and industries that tech has never before been able to serve.

Spatial technologies demand approaches to product development that take customer needs and technological innovation into equal consideration. In this talk, I'll share processes emerging technology businesses can use to assess their technological capabilities, and then use those learnings as a foundation to create powerful hypotheses about where their products can provide measurable value to customers.

We'll be leading an interactive discussion about how having strong and effective product leadership early on can help entrepreneurs avoid common risks and accelerate their business.