As digital practitioners we transform code into masterpieces and solve problems with our products. We also have a responsibility to understand our impact on the environment, with the internet projected to contribute 13% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2030.
If you work in product, communications, or computer engineering, this discussion aims to help you align your career in tech with the decarbonised future we can play a role in creating.
As artificial intelligence is baked into products and GPTs become ubiquitous in our work, the impact on the environment should be factored into our decision-making.
This discussion will present some of the frameworks of digital sustainability and help the Product anon Community understand what carbon emissions they can abate through thoughtful design and investment.
Bio: KB (Katherine) Buzza’s career begun in marketing before embarking on a journey to discover how business can drive positive environmental and social change. Having worked across sectors, she has maintained a passion for sharing knowledge and climate positive solutions.
Now as a product manager for carbon account software company Climate Zero, she wants to keep expanding the conversation about sustainability in tech beyond data centres and decisions outside of our control.
Our wonderful hosts and sponsor: Chargefox! Chargefox is part of the AMS Group. Every day thousands of drivers charge their vehicle on the Chargefox network – the largest and fastest growing EV charging network in Australia. We’re owned and operated by the NRMA, RACV, RACQ, RAA, RAC and RACT. The same companies supporting drivers for over 100 years https://www.chargefox.com/
Our first speaker from within our community for the May event is Felicity Bodgeron discussing her playbook on “How to become a Killer Product Manager in 3 Easy Steps.” This talk is for product managers who want to level up to become killer pms, creating a personal professional playbook will enable you to transform your team of mercenaries into missionaries while also fending off the monster chewing on your leg, unlike your run of the mill corporate values that only have the half-life of a power point presentation.
Our second speaker from within our community for the May event is Marc Vandamme – Creating alignment with your teams and leaders. Marc is Senior Product Manager @Performio. Loves climbing and is looking for indoor & outdoor lead climbing buddies!
Our third speaker from within our community for the May event is Nick Kardamitsis, discussing how to go “Beyond the numbers: Harnessing data for smarter product decisions.” Nickolas is an outcomes-focused, customer-centric problem solver, passionate about hitting organisational goals. With over 10 years in digital product experience, Nickolas navigates the end-to-end product lifecycle and leads both technical and non-technical teams, effortlessly switching between strategy and execution. He loves everything about product—especially the words, “Yes, but…”
One of ProdAnon’s goals is to help our community members learn and grow – and what better way to achieve that than give our members the chance to do short talks to share what they learned and get some public speaking experience. Several people who have spoken at ProdAnon have gone on to present at larger conferences which is awesome!
For our May session, we did a call out for folks interested in doing 15 min talks. And we had 4 wonderful speakers share their knowledge:
If you’re interested in doing a talk, reach out to Jen & Liz(slack, email, at an event). Typically, ProdAnon sessions are workshops, panels or individual speakers plus we sometimes do the short talk sessions.
Thank you for hosting Culture Amp! Culture Amp is the world’s leading employee experience platform, revolutionising how 25 million employees across more than 6,500 companies create a better world of work. Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, drive performance management, and develop high-performing teams. Powered by people science and the most comprehensive employee dataset in the world, the most innovative companies including Canva, On, Asana, Dolby, McDonalds and Nasdaq depend on Culture Amp every day. Culture Amp is backed by leading capital venture funds and has offices in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Culture Amp has been recognised as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and most innovative companies by Fast Company.
In the fast-paced world of product management, we frequently discuss the strategies behind making decisions and the art of influencing stakeholders. However, a crucial aspect of the role that often goes under explored is the ability to change one’s mind and remain open to being influenced.
Lucy Spence – October 2024 ProdAnon – photo by Baani Ahluwalia
In this session, Lucy talked about the nuanced art of changing your mind—an essential skill for growth and effective leadership.
You’ll have belief 1 and then something happens… you receive new information or have an emotional response or there’s a rational assessment which translates into belief 2. The journey between those 2 points is not always that simple and our own biology can throw a spanner into our thinking.
So when we’re making decisions constantly and those decisions are influenced by a lot of things including our own biological & emotional reactions, how can we grow? Well Lucy brought data & analysis to this question.
First, the let’s talk about the octopus. Lucy gave us some ‘facts’ covering octopus mating to see where we sat on the believe vs not believe scale (which also illustrated that science has changed their mind over time as information and research evolved). She then challenged us with a statement that we product people make thousands of decisions but only 1 or 2 are any good. Yikes! That hurt! Do we believe it?
Bring in the SCARF model (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness) to help us understand how our brain reacts because this journey can feel threatening, can be neutral or even rewarding! Saying we only make 1-2 good decisions in our entire career was tough. It was threatening to our status! Maybe we didn’t think it was fair or made us feel unsafe.
But if you recognise these things are happening and re-frame how you think about making decisions, growth can happen.
Lucy reflected that when she was new in her career, she was comfortable with being wrong. She was learning. It was expected because she was new and status & certainty was low. As her career progressed, she felt new pressures and expectations that she should know what she was doing. When she received contradictory information it was a threat to her status, autonomy and she felt more defensive. This led to her being less comfortable when she was wrong that translated into a slowness of being open to new ideas thus taking longer to adapt to a new idea.
One way Lucy re-framed changed the way she wrote documents. As a product person at Amazon, Lucy worked in the ‘working backwards’ style of press releases, 6 page reviews and starting meetings with silent reading before discussion of the document. While she worked with her trio to develop the document, she realised it was when it was circulated at higher levels that she was getting more clarity and good questions. She decided to be provocative in her statements early in the game so her trio and other peers would give better feedback. She re-framed that the document is about getting feedback, not about being right.
How do you know you’re making better decisions today than x years ago? How do you measure the effectiveness of making decisions? Bring in a 2×2 matrix! Lucy plotted process and decision.
Through this plotting, Lucy took on another belief – as a PM, when we make the decision we need to firmly believe it is correct but then switch quickly into how can we disprove it? How can we look at this with a different lens? What should I have done differently?
For greater success, we can seek out how to make better decisions & change our minds when needed.
Lucy Spence – October 2024 ProdAnon – photo by Gwen D’souza
About the speaker: As an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience, Lucy Spence has made more mistakes than most and loves sharing her experiences in the hopes others can learn what she’s learned in less painful ways. In that time, she’s gone from individual contributor to product leader a few times at a range of companies from start-ups to Amazon. As a Senior Product Manager at Octopus Deploy, you can expect to see many Octopus-based metaphors and analogies.
Catapult – October 2024 ProdAnon – photo by Gwen D’souza
Catapult was our fabulous host. Thank you Catapult!
Catapult exists to unleash the potential of every athlete and team on earth. Operating at the intersection of sports science and analytics, Catapult products are designed to optimise performance, avoid injury, and improve return to play. Catapult has over 400 staff based across 24 locations worldwide, working with more than 3,800 Pro teams in over 40 sports across more than 100 countries globally. To learn more about Catapult and to inquire about accessing performance analytics for a team or athlete, visit us at catapult.com. Follow us at @CatapultSports on social media for daily updates.
We’ll be hosting a panel with folk to talk about how to use your data effectively for product analytics decisions. It will be an opportunity for you to ask questions of the panel.
Mixpanel revolutionizes how companies link product analytics to tangible business outcomes. By understanding the full impact of product and marketing decisions, companies have the necessary information to optimize how they acquire and grow their customers. By providing complete, self-serve, and correct data in an easy-to-use platform, Mixpanel frees teams to move faster, see the whole picture, and measure impact. Visit mixpanel.com to learn more.
In the fast-paced world of product management, we frequently discuss the strategies behind making decisions and the art of influencing stakeholders. However, a crucial aspect of the role that often goes underexplored is the ability to change one’s mind and remain open to being influenced.
In this talk, we’ll delve into the nuanced art of changing your mind—an essential skill for growth and effective leadership. We’ll explore how to think about decisions, how that will likely evolve throughout your career, and how to handle some commonly occurring situations.
About the speaker: As an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience, Lucy Spence has made more mistakes than most and loves sharing her experiences in the hopes others can learn what she’s learned in less painful ways. In that time, she’s gone from individual contributor to product leader a few times at a range of companies from start-ups to Amazon. As a Senior Product Manager at Octopus Deploy, you can expect to see many Octopus-based metaphors and analogies.
Catapult is our fabulous host.
Catapult exists to unleash the potential of every athlete and team on earth. Operating at the intersection of sports science and analytics, Catapult products are designed to optimise performance, avoid injury, and improve return to play. Catapult has over 400 staff based across 24 locations worldwide, working with more than 3,800 Pro teams in over 40 sports across more than 100 countries globally. To learn more about Catapult and to inquire about accessing performance analytics for a team or athlete, visit us at catapult.com. Follow us at @CatapultSports on social media for daily updates.
Months ago, Liz & I were talking about doing an ‘AI share’ as in having ProdAnon-ers sharing how they were using AI tools in our daily work – and it was during a chat with Will Sheers that I thought this topic could be really interesting. 🙂 We had not discussed it more so I was happy to see Will pitch something similar at Product Camp – and be able to have an extended version of his talk this month. AND what an interesting talk from Will!
While Will was looking for work, he created a system that would do a competitor analysis for him – instead of spending hours prepping for the interview. Will shared with us a few ways we can use AI tools to help understand the market & competitor landscape.
We discussed all that goes into reviewing strategy & competitor analysis – checking product reviews, analysing the website for pricing, capabilities, understanding the types of competition, putting together a SWOT- and more. So what are the alternatives?
Easy
Ask ChatGPT or Claude or whichever LLM about the market, to create a SWOT for a particular business.
Search for GPTs that can help you. These are customised ChatGPTs which others have built for specific purposes. From the ChatGPT window, there’s a navigation item called ‘Explore GPTs’.
Ask where the data is from not only because of hallucinations but where did it get the data from? It may have done a quick search and used the first thing that appeared. Challenge the LLM to understand where the data is from.
Level up
Build a GPT Minion using ChatGPT – Besides being able to ‘explore’ the existing GPTs, you can ‘Create a GPT’
AND then… Creating your ai minions (um… agents)
A bit more challenging – Create your own agents to run off and do the work for you! You need to plan out the tasks your team will do and setup an agent for each. This assists with scalability, coordination, complex problem solving and specialisation.
Will stepped us through how he setup a team of agents who had different roles in putting the data together. One agent was responsible for finding product reviews while another would analyse those reviews. A third agent analysed the company website. The 3 agents feed their data to another bot who acted as the manager/strategist. This bot produced an analysis from the data given and made sure the 3 were given their tasks.
Want to start your own set of minions? Will recommends starting with this video CrewAi Crash Course and either knowing some Python or use an AI tool to give you code.
Thank you Will & Culture Amp for a fantastic evening!
Our Speaker: Will Sheers is a Product Leader, Strategist, and Advisor with a deep passion for AI. Currently, he leads product efforts for the AI & Innovation team at StarRez. Previously, as Head of Product, Will played a pivotal role in transforming LiveHire (ASX: LVH) into an award-winning AI-augmented Talent Acquisition and Engagement platform.
Thank you for hosting Culture Amp! Culture Amp is the world’s leading employee experience platform, revolutionizing how 25 million employees across more than 6,500 companies create a better world of work. Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, drive performance management, and develop high-performing teams. Powered by people science and the most comprehensive employee dataset in the world, the most innovative companies including Canva, On, Asana, Dolby, McDonalds and Nasdaq depend on Culture Amp every day. Culture Amp is backed by leading capital venture funds and has offices in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Culture Amp has been recognised as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and most innovative companies by Fast Company.
Join us for an engaging deep dive into the world of Agentic multi-agent AI, the cutting edge of practical AI applications. Witness a team of AI agents perform a live SWOT analysis, and discover how you can assemble your own AI “minions” to outsmart your competition.
Our Speaker: Will Sheers is a Product Leader, Strategist, and Advisor with a deep passion for AI. Currently, he leads product efforts for the AI & Innovation team at StarRez. Previously, as Head of Product, Will played a pivotal role in transforming LiveHire (ASX: LVH) into an award-winning AI-augmented Talent Acquisition and Engagement platform.
Our hosts: Culture Amp Culture Amp is the world’s leading employee experience platform, revolutionizing how 25 million employees across more than 6,500 companies create a better world of work. Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, drive performance management, and develop high-performing teams. Powered by people science and the most comprehensive employee dataset in the world, the most innovative companies including Canva, On, Asana, Dolby, McDonalds and Nasdaq depend on Culture Amp every day. Culture Amp is backed by leading capital venture funds and has offices in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Culture Amp has been recognised as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and most innovative companies by Fast Company.
