To build a personal brand…or to not build a personal brand…or to build a company brand…or to build both? Ben Lee joins us to debate the merits of investing in your personal brand versus your company brand.

A tech influencer, one of Inc.’s 30 Under 30, and cofounder of Rootstrap, Ben is also a partner and investor in Kitchen 24, and has been featured in Forbes, NPR and AdWeek. He has 40K+ followers on LinkedIn, and his posts regularly generate millions of views, thousands of engagements, as well as leads and conversions.

18 months ago, Ben wasn’t doing much with social media. Then he gamed the LinkedIn algorithm to generate 85 million views. Tune in for his take on whether personal brands are built to last, and strategies to leverage social media, email and more.

Within Capital One, design spans a huge gamut of things. From actual products to experiences, visual design, interface design and more, designers tackle a wide variety of needs, projects and products. At the center of these efforts, DesignOps aligns teams and workflows, so everything is humming along optimally.

As the Design Operations Lead: People Development at Capital One, Courtney Allison Brown ensures the organization for design is well managed. While her day-to-day constantly changes, a common theme is making sure there’s a solid footing for design. That people have an understanding of what everyone is working on, communication is flowing and designers continue to grow, learn and take on new challenges. Courtney joins us to talk about her path from art school to Ops, and how creating art keeps her fresh and helps her to explore new opportunities and ways to connect.

We all know how important customers are to the digital experience. At the WWE, those customers are the fans. Joe Lalley, Experience Design Leader, Digital Transformation at PwC, entered the ring of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) as the Vice President of Digital Products and Operations. There, he led digital teams to deliver many different products across many different platforms.

Joe joins us to talk about this exciting time in his life, and how WWE helped shape how he approaches digital today. Sharing Vince McMahon’s same fan-first perspective, Joe engaged customers both online and offline—in concession stand lines, inside the Superdome and at various other touch points to really get to know fans. Hear his advice for getting close to your customers and why it’s always important to treat each day like your first day on the job.

Not so long ago, design was viewed as aesthetics, a nice-to-have in the world of business. With the rise of Apple and other enormously successful design-centric organizations, design has claimed its rightful throne. Today, design is recognized as a powerful business differentiator. From customer satisfaction and loyalty to revenue, valuation, time to market and more, design has clear bottom-line benefits.

As the Director of Design Education at InVision, Leah Buley has a front-row seat to the business impacts of design. A self-described data nerd, Leah and the team at InVision have just released The New Design Frontier, the largest design maturity study to date. Spanning 2,200 companies across 24 industries and 77 countries, the report explores the five levels of design maturity, and how companies can create better business outcomes with design. Leah joins us to walk us through the report, share some “aha” moments and offer some insights to use at your own organization.

Nearly nine years ago, Nora Lahl left print production at a traditional agency to venture into the world of digital. Signing on with Lightburn, a Milwaukee-based web design and digital marketing agency, she saw the need for a move from a focus on projects to a focus on client services and client relationships. Stretching outside her job description, she went to work fulfilling that need.

Today, Nora is a partner at Lightburn. After nearly a decade building relationships with clients and investing in Lightburn’s success, she knows a great deal about what works and what doesn’t. Nora joins us to talk about her journey from print to digital, how project managers can level up to business leaders and what it takes to go after and formalize an executive role.

About two months ago, we invited digital shops to help us shine a light on market trends, by sharing business conditions in 2018 and expectations for 2019. Nearly 170 shops responded, sharing a general consensus that business was good in 2018 with healthy revenue growth, solid employee efficiency results and strong profits. But there were some unexpected findings on how generalists did compared to specialists and different characteristics that had some shops growing much faster than others.

Thanks to our partner, Promethean Research, we were able to dig deeper into the data and collect insights across many key performance indicators for our annual State of the Industry Report. Nick Petroski, Managing Director at Promethean Research, joins us to talk about what the research revealed, a few surprises and where the industry is headed.

Each day, we fire up app upon app upon app, going through the motions to create and organize our work and business in meaningful ways. Trouble is, all of that work takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. It can lead to a culture of chaos, leaving people frustrated when they can’t find things, align teams or projects or benchmark data to make good decisions.

Mark van Leeuwen, CEO of VOGSY, has been working in projects his entire life. He knows how complex professional services can be, and how difficult it can be to create change. Mark joins us to share insights gathered from working with many, many professional services organizations, and talk about some of the ways technology can ease our pain.

Looking back over the past few years, some have a tidy, linear career path. Others’ professional journeys are a series of unexpected twists and turns. Kianosh Pourian is a technologist with 20 years of experience in the web development industry. After working at Staples for over eight years, Kianosh set out on his own—right in the midst of the great financial crisis.

He found success with his own consulting firm, went through a merger and then his new company experienced a lull in the pipeline. Never expecting an offer for acquisition at that exact moment in time, that’s exactly what happened. With the deal inked, Kianosh went from an organization of seven people to being part a 150-plus company. Months later, the office Kianosh called home was shuttered.

Throughout this rollercoaster ride, Kianosh has stayed true to founding principles. Before being acquired, Kianosh’s company didn’t have a vision statement. It had one word, and that word was “empathy.” In many ways, he’s come full circle, back to the desire to venture forth and build new things. Kianosh joins us to talk about the lessons life has to teach us and how it’s always best to go with your intuition.

Margaret Lee, Director of UX Community & Culture at Google, began her career before the Internet was really a thing. After majoring in architecture, she decided she didn’t want to be an architect, then stumbled into technology by accident. As she describes it, her career has almost been a process of elimination, of trying different things and figuring out what did and didn't work for her.

From early days as a design practitioner to becoming a design lead and a manager, she never planned to be a leader—or really saw herself as one. Her journey has been an organic one, shaped by her willingness to volunteer for new roles and get outside her comfort zone.

Margaret joins us to talk about her path to Google, nearly 10 years leading the Geo UX organization and the many different faces of leadership. Hear how her current role cultivates UX knowledge, community and talent, and why it's better to call it early than to try to stick with something that doesn’t feel right.

It’s a brand that many of us grew up with, pages sprawled open on the kitchen table or stockpiled in the garage. Founded in 1936, Consumer Reports has been a mainstay of savvy consumer decision-making for more than 80 years. In the minds of millions of subscribers, the brand has long been synonymous with unbiased testing, research and consumer advocacy.

Over the decades, Consumer Reports has worked to reach new audiences, and bring the magazine experience online. And they’ve found success in their efforts. They were one of the first to charge for content and do it well. With their broad media portfolio spanning online, print and TV, they’ve steadily shifted from more transactional-oriented ratings engagements to experiences that hold you over time.

Cara Determan, Director of User Experience at Consumer Reports, has helped lead that change. Together with her team, Cara has helped to evolve the Consumer Reports experience into what it is today. Cara joins us to talk about CR’s recent redesign, membership and the journey to align everyone around reimagined experiences.