2027 speakers
adriana harper
TALK
Grieving the discipline we trained for—and building the one that comes next
There’s a grief that isn’t getting talked about in UX: watching your discipline change shape faster than you can keep up with it, and feeling the pride, confidence, and identity you once found in your work disappear right along with it.
Over the past year, Adriana watched almost everything she once knew to be true shift: the discipline lines, the tools, even the basic sense of what the job is. She’s not alone. A lot of us genuinely don’t know what we’re doing anymore, quietly mourning the discipline we trained for, and the identity that went with it.
In this talk, Adriana makes the case that grief and progress aren’t opposites. Reclaiming our agency is what actually moves us through the grief, not around it. She’ll walk through how she redefined the content design and strategy practice at her organization with no template, no precedent, and no direction, and what it means to hold onto that work, and yourself as a maker, in whatever comes next.
ABOUT THIS SPEAKER
Adriana (she/her) is a content strategist and designer with more than 20 years in SaaS, from startups to global corporations.
She’s rarely had a template to work from: often the only content person in the room, defining the work itself, watching titles change under her, and sometimes holding a title with nothing to do with the work she was actually doing. She’s weathered layoffs, run her own consultancy, and turned “no one’s done this here before” into her specialty. Based in Alberta, Canada, she spends her downtime buried in a book, watching or playing anything sports-related with her partner, and getting snuggles from her cat, Wilson.