Tech careers in Waterloo Region can be fascinating and frustrating. On one hand, you can help build world-changing products and services. On the other, if your specialty is something less straightforward than developing software or marketing it, you can sometimes have a hard time finding a niche in which to ply your trade.

Part of the issue is the varying levels of company maturity in the area. Either there are companies big enough to have their own departments of such roles, or there are companies too small to need these services full-time. UX is one of the disciplines that can fall between these two ends of the spectrum, along with knowledge management, community management, product management, and others.

Particularly at small companies, every staff member ends up wearing many hats. Are they experts in all areas? No, but such is life. You learn, you improvise, you rinse and repeat. And the way you get better is by talking to as many people as you can and learning as many different things as you can. Who knows, one of these mixed-bag roles might even be the gateway to one discipline that you discover is your true passion (like UX, naturally...)

Relatedly, recently I gave a presentation about how technical and non-technical staff can work best together, and one of the recommendations was such cross-functional learning. Take a coding course, futz about with Photoshop, attend a conference presentation or workshop about something that may not seem very targeted to your career or company. (Like a fabulous local UX conference for a product manager, perhaps?)

These things help you understand better the roles of others you work with in design, development, and elsewhere. They help you be more creative, think more broadly and understand your company more holistically.

Ok, but what does all of this have to do with Fluxible? Well, Fluxible is a UX conference, but that doesn’t mean all the attendees have to be UX experts or students of the discipline. In fact, I hope they’re not. Variety is the spice of life, so I’d love to see designers rub shoulders with developers, communicators, marketers... hell, even HR and finance folks.

Fluxible IS for you. Design, good and bad, rules our lives, our companies, and our jobs. The car you drove to work in and the chair you're sitting in. The converted loft space or the grey cube that is your work environment. The colours of your company's website and the flow of your ecommerce experience. The most subtle things can have a big impact — if you know how and why.

We all face customers. Every day. Yup, even those finance folks. Customers can be folks on the street or online who might buy your product. They can be other companies. They can be other departments you work with within your company. And the best way to develop good relationships with customers is to listen to them and understand them. You've already got ears for listening, but for the understanding, wouldn't it be incredibly helpful if you could practically read their minds? To understand WHY they want what they want or do what they do?

Fluxible will help you understand how people think (even unconsciously) and how their perceptions drive their actions. I’d say that’s pretty important for all areas of business. Fluxible will help you understand where technology and communications are going because of where they’ve been and where they are now. Who knows, maybe Fluxible will help you become one of those innovators everyone seems to want to know (or become).

So if you’re a UX professional, absolutely we want to see you at Fluxible. People are working on amazing things in Waterloo Region and around the world, and we want to learn about them. We want to know what fascinates and infuriates you. We want to know what you’d love to learn about.

But we also want you there if you fit somewhere else. In one of those niches I mentioned: knowledge management, community management, documentation. Yes, even HR and finance. Because the more minds we have meshing, the more ideas we’ll come up with. And the more perspectives we share, the broader and deeper our considerations of our own conundrums and opportunities will be.

Plus, bottom line, getting smarter and more creative with really cool folks just sounds like a lot of fun. Which, after all, is really the main goal of Fluxible in the first place. Come and tell us about your niche.