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.

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’s slides are available.

During the talk she referenced

• SCARF model
• Bounce
• Evan LaPointe‘s interview with Lenny
• Thinking Fast and Slow
• Naked Statistics
• Wes Kao on managing up
• Escalating Product Decisions – an article Lucy wrote several years ago

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 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.

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.

This month we ran a workshop instead of a talk. If you attended, we’d love to get feedback on this session. Would you like more of this? What worked well? What could have been better? Reach out to Jen & Liz on the ProdAnon slack.

Designing the box+

The ‘Design the Box’ is a classic activity created by Gamestorming.com in 2011. The goal is simple – to create the design of a physical box that sells your product. The limited real-estate and creating a physical ‘thing’ forces participants to focus on who is the customer, what is important for them, and how do we influence the buying decision.

This is known as the value proposition – simple statements that summarizes why a customer would choose your product or service. Every value proposition should speak to a customer’s challenge and make the case for your company as the problem-solver.

Essentially this activity is about identifying the ideal customer persona (ICP) for your product, and the value proposition that will engage your customer to buy your product.

Steve Bauer took this classic and fun activity and rebooted it for the online world. The product isn’t always a box any more. It could be an information card hanging at Officeworks, or a Gift card at 7-11. Alternatively it might be an electronic representation instead of a physical product; like a web landing page or an App Store page. The sales channel may change, but the customer still needs the product. Identifying and designing the channel for the ICP and value proposition and designing for the channel still needs to be done.

Definitely try this at home.

This is a fun exercise you can run at your own company. For example each team competes for the design of the same product, the teams takes separate modules of the product, or the team creates competitor products. The activity, the focus on the customer, and the learning about your value proposition is the same.

The steps we followed were:

1. Create groups. A good size for collaboration is 4 or so people
2. Fill the box. Choose the product that is inside the box; physical or virtual.
3. Choose the shape. Is it a physical box, a landing page, a gift card, etc.
4. Build the box. Create a physical design
5. Share the box. Share your design with other teams, highlighting why certain value propositions were considered important.

Ready, Set, Go…

Once teams formed, they needed to decide on a product so there was a bit of brainstorming! It turns out people are too happy to chat about ideas, or what goes on the outside. However quick reminders about the time helped nudged them into making decisions and moving on.

Overall we had some fantastic products and boxes. We ended up with 3 products focused on pets, a few concerned about the environment and one protecting us from scams (all details below).

Team 1: A self driving car for teenage drivers.

Specifically the buyer is the worried parent and the user is the teenager (who can do their homework while on the way to school because they’re not driving!). For the parent, the benefits were safety and control. Lots of data and logos of safety organisations to communicate this self driving car is safe for your teenager who has no or not so great driving skills. Teenagers make mistakes, our cars don’t!

Team 2: ChatGPT premium gift cards

Expanding on the current ChatGPT product, one group re-imagined what it looks like as a physical product. Creating a gift card similar to the Spotify, Amazon, JB HiFi cards you see for sale at various stores, they offered a 3 month subscription. This helps to bring awareness to ChatGPT to a much larger audience including those non-techies. They did they by showing sample questions to the packaging to help show what people can do with this and how it might appeal to everyone.

Team 3 – Hear Boy

This team created a product for dogs with hearing loss (which impacts 20-30% of all dogs) to help them hear the world again. It reduces anxiety by 8%, increases walkies by 250%, simple and easy to setup, recommended by vets, lifetime guarantee! The slides of the box highlight partnerships which let your dog have an even better life – dog playlists to listen to and an ai costume generator! *note: Product Anonymous does not vouch for any of this data 🙂

Team 3: BuddyBot for housework and pets

The next team tackled 2 problems we’re having now as we return to the office – the anxiety we have about leaving our pets at home alone and not being able to do housework between meetings. With BuddyBot, they have brought together a robot vacuum with AI to play with your pet which let’s you watch the play via their app! Their design had big pet pictures on the front of the box to draw you in and lots of features across the back including warranty information and highlighting the vacuum has won the 2024 Good Design Awards!

Team 4: Taste good, do good, feel good coffee

Sustainability & traceability of coffee was very important for this team. On the front of the box, they focused on a simple message of the quality of the product (which is good!) and that you are doing good by buying the product. They included the the logos of various environmental groups to give it the thumbs up that this is a legit product. On the back there was information on how it was sourced ethically – even the the box itself is sustainable because you can return/exchange it.

Team 5: Saving the planet with recycling

Our next group had a product where you put your e-waste in the box and it spits out new electronic products. On the front of the box, there’s lots of social proof including that it’s been #1 seller on Amazon, approval from your local council and a quote from an environmental organisation CEO. Their tag line: Save Money! Save Time! Save Space! Save the Planet! Use that box of cables you have at home! On the sides, there’s the colour options and visual design (not text) instructions of how you take that box of cables you have at home and recycle with this box! Of course the the bottom of the box was reserved for ‘lots of legal stuff’.

Team 6: Dogminder

There’s also the dogminder product – version 2 now comes with more pats! This is a service represented in a box so there’s lots of cute pix of dogs! There’s lots of quotes from users including dog users (‘woof!’). Having easy steps to follow to use the service was also important.

Team 7: Crook Block

This amazing product blocks your phone from receiving spam calls and messages. On the front of the box were the logos – certified by AFP & AU Govt and lots of seals of protection! plus ‘Now with more AI’ They used a humorous approach including an image of a phone with a chastity belt on the back of the box.

Team 8: Protein jelly shots

This team was helping the hard gainers who power lift, but don’t see massive improvement in strength because they struggle to get enough protein. They developed high protein jelly shots to help you! The front of the box was full of numbers and benefits – each shot has 50 grams of protein so you only need 2 a day to reach what you need, low sugar, vegan, gluten free, low gi, all the free things, stevia AND available in 5 flavours! On the side of the box you can scan the QR code which brings you into the community and gives you a free sample.

And the winner is…

All of the groups did such a fantastic job with their boxes, we decided to have everyone present and have our hosts, Chargefox, select a winner!

 Thank you to Chargefox for hosting!!

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/

Want to run your own Design the Box session? Reach out to Steve and the Product Anonymous team. Alternatively jump to gamestorming for more details.