Alastair is a product design manager, leader and mentor. He loves working with teams to solve complex business and interaction design challenges.

Alastair currently leads a multi-disciplinary design team at Atlassian across our Platform services, Stride and Confluence. His team is spread across 3 locations (Sydney, San Francisco, Austin) and are responsible for the user experience across some of Atlassian's largest cloud products.

He's an advocate of applying lean customer centric design and design thinking frameworks to solve problems. He also has vast experience leading teams and designing interfaces across multiple devices, with a proven track record of delivering user friendly digital experiences on high growth products.

Between 2012 and 2016 Atlassian grew from 6 to 126 designers. In the last 2 years they have grown again to almost 200 members within their design team. Throughout this growth they didn't start with a blank canvas of brand new products and a small company. When they had only 6 designers and began to scale, Atlassian was close to 1,000 staff and their products were used by millions of people. Growing a design practice from this starting point often felt like they were mid-flight and needed to design the landing gear before touching down in just a few hours. Scary. Exciting. Tough. Don't f*ck it up. All rolled into one. Alastair Simpson (Head of Design, All Teams) will share how Atlassian has successfully integrated design into the way they build their products, and how they design their company. Come for the hard lessons learned about how to grow and lead design teams as you scale. Learn from some of the mistakes they have made and turbulence along the way as they have changed how Atlassian builds products and their company.