Workshop Logo
Eventbrite - Before User Stories II

A one-day workshop giving participants a toolkit to envision products.

Learn how to validate and grow ideas from early inception to their first valuable requirements.

This workshop takes place on May 20th 2017 in Athens. Greece.

Lean UX
for all.

The workshop fuses UX, Agile Software Development and Lean Startup principles and is open to software developers as well as business, marketing and UX practitioners of all levels who are involved in software-based product development.


Designed for learning.

Participants are shown techniques and experience what it is like to use them in a structured environment designed for learning. Participants learn from those techniques and from each other.

In this workshop the focus is on techniques, principles, process and the "why" for doing things, rather than on (computer-based) tools. We don't use laptops, just pens and paper.


A workshop, not a tutorial!

A 'work-shop' means that participants do the work. The organsiers and facilitators bring their skills and knowledge to help people learn. Participants must bring their experience and be ready to learn, share and solve problems! This is not a tutorial. It is both hard work and fun.

Event pic


To contact us about this or similar events send an email to hi at zanshinlabs.io and we will reply asap.


Our Sponsors



The organising team
behind the workshop.

John, Sotiris and Vassilis are "the machine building the workshop and Bruce merely the oil" as he likes to remind them.

Bruce Anderson
our shepherd

Bruce worked for 20 years as a university teacher and researcher and 15 years as a consultant and software architect at IBM. He was a professor of computer science at University of Essex where he investigated principles of architecture and software design. He has bicycled around the world, climbed the tallest trees in America and meditated to the fifth level of enlightenment. He asks very good questions, is a kind leader and a friend to ducks everywhere.

You'll find Bruce on page 'xi' of the "Design Patterns" book and in the History of Patterns

Bruce didn't realise he was more of an engineer than a scientist until he was about 29 years old. By then, he had an Oxford MA (in Physics), an Edinburgh MSc (in Artificial Intelligence), a couple of years in the US mainly at the Stanford AI Lab, a year in CS at Essex doing AI and a new job in the Essex Electronics department. He then worked as a Senior Managing Consultant in IBM Global Services (techie branch) where he shared, applied and developed his ideas.

Now he's retired, doing almost no IT and keeping busy without being paid.

Bruce worked in many kinds of organisations and many different industries, in many roles, but his abiding interest is in learning and "what practitioners know". He initiated a series of workshops on the "Architecture Handbook", playing a part in the early days of the Patterns movement. Bruce has run many learning workshops, including several pan-European interactive events with a highly participative and empowering style for 160 participants. Jointly with Steve Cook Bruce led the creation of the OT (now SPA) series of conferences in the UK (now in their twenty-second year), and have run several OOPSLA workshops.

Bruce knows that people love to collaborate and learn together and from each other, when they are free to do so - free from unnecessary pressure and free from false models of learning and knowledge. Such people enjoy life and work productively.

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John Pagonis

John invested too many (he thinks) years developing smartphone OS software so now he is having fun developing software for machine learning and recommender systems. When he grows up he wants to become a great software engineer and score a win over information overload. In the mean time he helps teams develop better software with Scrum.

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Sotiris Sotiropoulos

Sotiris spent his Padawan years painting fantastic worlds as an indie game artist. Nowadays he has the same job description as C3PO: Human-Cyborg relations or UI/UX Design, which means his artistic skills have been transferred to interfaces and interactions. Combining methodologies such as Agile, Lean and Human-Centered design in his work process he tries to make Earth a better place to live, free of design flaws and ugly stuff.

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Vassilis Vatikiotis

Vassilis saw a ZX Spectrum+ on the table and while he had never seen or even heard anything about computers, he knew it was something beautiful and magical. Fast forward to the present and after several programming and engineering positions, he still thinks that computers are indeed these magical objects which help us shape our world. Being a builder at heart has never been so rewarding! These days Vassilis shares his time as a system engineer in a research institute and as a Web developer.

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Our great facilitator team
supporting the workshop.

Maria, Stella, Athina and Javier make sure the workshop runs smoothly and ask all the right questions ...so that progress is made!

Maria Karydi

Being an avid climber with a movie star class smile doesn't even begin to desctibe Maria. Like many millionaires, she started her professional career as the girl who makes the coffee, but that didn't stop her to learn, evolve, and experience the various facets of artistic expression and creativity. These days Maria leads the UX and design team of a multinational company and practices to climb even higher heights.

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Stella Vareli

Stella studied Mechanical Engineering because since she was a small girl, she was fascinated with how things work. Lean Manufacturing and agile enthousiast, highly creative, free spirit, thirsty to learn new things and meet new people. She has an artist's heart but what really drives her is interacting with people and listening to their needs.

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Javier Gonel

Javier is a Lean/Agile aficionado who cares not only about the software being built but also about why that software has to be built in the first place. He enjoys solving problems with code and games since he got a Commodore 64. Unfortunately for that Commodore 64, he also enjoys disassembling things.

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To contact us about this or similar events send an email to hi at zanshinlabs.io and we will reply asap.


Copyright 2015 - 2017 by the OTB crew, hack at will.