On September 8, Fast Company named Noble one of the Best Workplaces for Innovators for 2026.
A few weeks later, I was at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, sitting in on panels with people like the CEO of Bombas and a design lead from Spotify. We went in large part because of the award presentation, but I also wanted it to be a learning trip. I wanted new perspectives.
I came home with four ideas I couldn’t stop turning over, the kind you want to test on your own team before the energy of the room wears off. Here’s what they were.
The Fast Company Innovation Festival, in Brief
The Fast Company Innovation Festival runs for several days each fall in Manhattan. It’s part conference, part interactive experiential festival, hundreds of sessions on everything from brand strategy to robotics to how design is changing with AI. You’ll catch a CEO on one stage and a product researcher on the next.
Most of it happens in one building, which matters more than it sounds like it should. You’re not losing half a day running between venues the way you do at a lot of events this size, and being around other founders and operators who take innovation as seriously as we do is priceless.
Some sessions matched their titles better than others, which is true of most conferences this size. But the ones that landed, landed hard.
Theme #1: Culture Changes, Values Hold
One panel, Leading with Purpose in a Divided World, put Jason LaRose, CEO of Bombas, next to Lindsay Shumlas, CEO of Cotopaxi. Both companies build giving straight into how they operate. LaRose said something that stuck with me more than anything else that day: the culture of a company will change, but the values have to stay the same.
That was an eye-opener for me. Noble has been in business 23 years, and we’ve definitely had different cultures across that span, different people, different ways of working. A light bulb went off when LaRose said that, because the thing that’s actually held consistent through all of it has been our values and principles, the ones we’ve put real definition behind. Hearing him say it out loud validated that we’re on the right path. It got me excited all over again about what we’re continuing to build.
Theme #2: Good Design Makes Technology Invisible
Another panel paired Carson Caprara, Chief Product Officer at Brooks Running, with Brooke Ellis, Chief Design Officer at Block, and Emily Galloway, Senior Director of Product Design at Spotify. I went in partly because I run, so I wanted to hear how Caprara thinks about shoe technology. But it was Galloway who said the thing I keep repeating to people.
She was talking about Spotify DJ, the feature that plays music with AI-generated commentary between tracks, and she said you don’t need a reason to create something valuable. That stopped me. I kept thinking about Rodney Copperbottom from the Robots movie, see a need, fill a need, and here was someone telling a room full of people that the need doesn’t have to come first.
Good design makes technology invisible. Clients buy the experience. The tech is just how we get there. Our team can get deep into the logistics of how something gets built, the AI tools, the backend work, because the details matter to us. They should. But I want all of us thinking about the experience the whole way through, how it feels to work with us and what the end result actually does for the person using it.
Theme #3: We Aren’t Failing Enough
Two lines from the Imagineering session stayed with me longer than almost anything else at the festival. Leslie Evans, VP of R&D for Walt Disney Imagineering, said sometimes you just have to try something and see what happens. Bruce Vaughn, President and Creative Officer at Walt Disney Imagineering, put it more bluntly: one of our biggest issues is we aren’t failing enough.
I’ve idolized this group for years. Imagineers are early adopters, thinking through robotics and new technology before most people have a name for it, and they do it as detailed, fluid people who work well in groups. Hearing them talk about failure so openly gave me a kind of permission I didn’t know I was looking for. We want to spark something great for the people we work with, but wanting that and being willing to risk getting it wrong are two different things, and I think we lean too hard toward protecting against the second one.
This is going to show up in how we think about professional development going forward. I’ve been working with Senior Leaders on a professional growth roadmap for our managers, and real failure needs to be part of that conversation.
Theme #4: If You’re Not the Best, You’re Routing Business Away
Paula Berg, VP of Brand and Corporate Marketing at HPE, spoke on a panel called The Simplicity Advantage for the World’s Top B2B Brands. One line from her session is something I wrote down word for word: “If you’re saying the same thing as everyone else in your market and you aren’t the best, you’re quietly sending work to your competitor instead.”
Most markets are loud with companies saying the same thing in different ways. Saying it accurately isn’t enough if you can’t back it up. If you’re not actually the best at what you’re claiming, someone else in the market is, and that’s who gets the call. Berg’s point was really about whether the claim underneath the language is true.
What I’m Taking Back
Four ideas have stuck with me days later, and there were a handful more I didn’t get to here. But some of the best parts of this trip never happened on a stage. We caught up with past TAAN members and had dinner with clients while we were in town, the kind of meaningful connections that don’t show up on any event schedule but matter just as much as what’s on it.
I keep coming back to the design panel, though. I want our team asking what the technology actually does for the person using it, not just how well it was built. That conversation starts this week.
