Scott Belsky
Entrepreneur, Author, & Investor
Crafting The First Mile Of Product Experience
As leaders become immersed in their products and businesses, they become more focused on the customers they have and less on those they don’t. This natural tendency to gravitate towards your best customers handicaps your ability to build and sustain increasingly inclusive products and services. History is full of companies that failed to sustain their focus on new customers, added complexity, and suffered as a result. If you aspire to engage millions (or hundreds of millions) of people, you must defy the tendency to prioritise features for your best customers at the expense of the “first mile” of product experience for every customer. In this session, Scott Belsky explores the psychology of customers during their initial use of a new product or service and the common obstacles and strategies a team must employ to successfully scale a product - and business - over time.
About Scott Belsky
Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, and investor. Scott founded Behance, the leading online platform for the creative industry to showcase and discover creative world, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. After the acquisition, Scott served as Adobe's Vice President of Products, rebooting Adobe's mobile product and marketplace strategies and leading Behance until 2016.
Scott actively advises and invests in businesses that cross the intersection of technology and design, and help empower people. He is a Venture Partner with Benchmark, and is an early advisor and investor in Pinterest, Uber, sweetgreen, and Periscope as well as several others in the early stages. He is also co-founder and Chairman of a new marketplace product under development.
Through his work as a founder and investor, Scott has become an advocate for technology and community initiatives that empower creative people and help businesses leverage the creative potential of their people. He is the author of Making Ideas Happen, and founded 99U, a publication and annual conference devoted to productivity in the creative world.