UX Leadership Exchange Seattle
UX and product leaders: please join us for an insightful conversation on how UX leaders are navigating our current landscape of complexity, change, and opportunity.
In a candid thought starter, Bill Flora (The New York Times) and Ben Shown (Blink UX) will share how product envisioning at The New York Times helped align teams across News, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic: shaping direction, sharpening decision‑making, and turning ideas into products people return to every day.
They’ll be joined by Celeste Bernard, VP of Product Experience at LPL Financial, and Amish Patel, founder of Conduit Venture Labs for a panel discussion grounded in real‑world leadership challenges and emerging signals shaping the future of UX and AI.
Panel topics include:
Leading teams through change and uncertainty
UX trends defining the remainder of 2026
Driving internal AI adoption and workflow transformation
Designing and researching AI‑powered experiences
Agenda
20‑minute thought starter with Bill Flora & Ben Shown
45‑minute panel discussion
Networking happy hour
Panel Speakers
Celeste Bernard, VP of Product Experience, LPL Financial
Bill Flora, Product Creative Director, The New York Times
Amish Patel, Founder, Managing Director, CEO, Conduit Venture Labs
Ben Shown, Head of Design, Blink UX
Moderated by: Laura Blanchard, VP of Design, Blink UX
We hope to see you there!
Speaker Bios
Celeste Bernard, VP of Product Experience, LPL Financial
Celeste Bernard leads design and AI-driven product innovation at LPL Financial, supporting 32,000 advisors and 8 million investors across a $2.4 trillion platform.
She is driving enterprise AI transformation by embedding agent-based workflows across the product lifecycle—accelerating research, design, and delivery while improving quality at scale. Celeste led the firm’s first end-to-end AI/ML product launch in under two months using tools like Cursor and Snowflake.
She also leads UX and conversational AI strategy for LPL’s flagship virtual assistant—designing more intuitive, context-aware interactions that support advisor decision-making and streamline client engagement. In parallel, she is defining and scaling enterprise UX patterns for agentic systems, enabling AI agents to operate consistently and effectively across investing, planning, banking, and trading experiences.
Her work offers a practical, execution-focused view into how AI is reshaping teams, workflows, and competitive advantage.
Bill Flora, Product Creative Director, New York Times
Bill Flora is an award-winning creative director and product design strategist with more than 30 years of experience leading teams and shipping products.
During his two decades with Microsoft, Bill led design efforts for Xbox, Windows Media Center, Zune, Encarta Encyclopedia and was the design force behind the “Metro” Microsoft design language. Past clients while at Tectonic and Blink include NASA, HBO, Bang & Olufsen, Beats by Dre, Cisco, Samsung, Dell, NBC and others.
Bill is currently with The New York Times leading their product envisioning efforts and teaching IxD courses at the University of Washington
Amish Patel, Founder, Managing Director, CEO, Conduit Venture Labs
Amish Patel leads Conduit Venture Labs, a venture studio dedicated to building and backing companies that merge software intelligence with the physical world. By leveraging expertise in operational execution, product design, and venture capital, the studio transforms innovative technologies into impactful products and businesses. Amish's background includes leadership roles in product and design within consumer and medical technology, with a passion for blending design, behavior science, and engineering to build trusted, widely adopted solutions.
Ben Shown, Head of Design, Blink UX
Ben Shown is a design leader obsessed with the kind of ambitious futures teams can actually move toward. Equal parts design nerd and creative mentor, he brings playful curiosity to complex challenges and a deep belief in user-centered everything.
As Head of Design at Blink UX, Ben helps industry giants like Amazon, Microsoft, NASA, and The New York Times orient around the futures they’re trying to build. Beyond agency work, he teaches at Northeastern University, spreading his enthusiasm for making tech less frustrating and more equitable. And while he’s diplomatic about most design debates, mention Murphy beds and all bets are off.