SCOTT BELSKY
Chief Strategy Officer and EVP, Design & Emerging Products, at Adobe
Bestselling author of two books & writer of leading technology industry newsletter, Implications
Scott is a renowned entrepreneur, investor & author who has successfully navigated the world of startups and creativity. As a speaker, he offers practical insights & inspiration on how to harness your creative potential & turn your ideas into action, making him a valuable addition to any event or conference.
Scott Belsky is Chief Strategy Officer and EVP, Design & Emerging Products, at Adobe. Scott's primary focus is making Creative Cloud a creativity platform for all. As chief product officer and executive vice president, Creative Cloud, Scott leads product management and engineering for Creative Cloud products and services, Adobe Spark, and Behance, Adobe’s community of 10 million creatives. Scott also oversees Adobe’s Design team, which is responsible for experience design across all Adobe products.
Prior to joining Adobe in December 2017, Scott was a venture investor at Benchmark in San Francisco. This is Scott’s second tenure at Adobe. He originally joined the company after it acquired Behance in 2012. At that time, he led Adobe’s mobile strategy for Creative Cloud. Scott co-founded Behance in 2006 and served as its CEO for six years.
Scott is the author of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality(2010) and The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture (2018).
Scott has been an advisor on design and product management for leading companies and organizations, including Adidas, Pentagram, Pinterest, Proctor & Gamble, Facebook, and the United States Government. In 2010, Fast Company included Scott on its list of "100 Most Creative People in Business."
Speech topics
Navigating A.I.
Whether your team is in finance, marketing, product development, or some form of research, the “4 P’s” framework examines how to navigate the path ahead:
Play: allow your teams to play with new technology despite the risks.
Pilot: All great revolutions at work start with a pilot - one project that the team is encouraged to do “the new way.”
Protect: Make sure that the pilot project has a different set of objectives that don’t penalize the drivers. The goal should be learning, not revenue or conversion.
Provoke: Invite the tough questions from those that participate or watch the new play unfold. The culture must allow for people to question the ROI, the ethics, or the implications.
Waves Of Change & Implications
Considering the impact of AI on your business? How trends in the workplace impact productivity? How the next generation of brands will engage their customers? As a prominent seed investor, entrepreneur, former Benchmark partner, and Adobe’s Chief Product Officer, Scott has a monthly practice of aggregating forecasts across technology and culture, and then writing an analysis of implications for each leveraging his extensive network.
The Messy Middle
Scott's national bestselling book, The Messy Middle, has been critically acclaimed as an indispensable resource for enduring volatility and working as a team to optimize your product and team along the way. It chronicles how startups and big companies attempting bold turnarounds are able to endure the volatility of change, steward long-term projects to fruition, and optimize toward positive outcomes. Lately, Scott has been doing sessions with teams reviewing best practices for building teams and products during periods of uncertainty, and these presentations and subsequent conversations have been very well received.
Making Ideas Happen
Great ideas only see the light of day when creative people and teams are able to get organized, harness the forces of community, and become better leaders of themselves and others. After years of research, Scott Belsky and his team at Behance have found a series of best practices common across some of the world's most productive creative people and teams. Scott is the author of the national bestselling book "Making Ideas Happen" (Penguin Books, April 2010) and leads Behance, the world's largest online platform of creative professionals. In 2012, Scott became Adobe's Vice President of Product/Community after Adobe's acquisition of Behance. In this session, Scott will share insights and practical tips that you can use to push bold creative projects to completion.
Related Books: 99u
Books
The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
These essential insights for enduring and optimizing the middle miles will outfit you to find your way through the messy middle of any bold project or new venture.
Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
How the world's leading innovators push their ideas to fruition again and again.