While Leading the Product is going online this year, they are still continuing the tradition of short lightning talks and once again, ProdAnon is involved with the LTP Pitchfest.
What’s pitchfest? Pitchfest gives you the opportunity to pitch for one of the conference lightning talks. Pitches are voted on by both the audience & conference judges.
I’d like to pitch! Well then… get onto this NOW! 😉
LTP is requesting video submissions so pick your favourite Product Management topic (loves and hates) and create a 90-second video of your idea and submit it. The Brainmates team will pick our top videos and then present these to the audience on the night for their vote. No slides… just you sharing with the crowd & judges.
You do not need to give the talk via video or on the 25th… this is a short pitch.
I’d like to vote & support folks!RSVP and you’ll receive a Zoom link prior to the event. You’ll be able to watch the pitches & vote for who you’d like to hear at LTP!
The judging panel in addition to you! – Liz Blink and Jen Leibhart – Co-Founders, Product Anonymous – Adrienne Tan – CEO, Brainmates – Christopher Rolik – Director of Digital Product Experience, IAG
This Thursday June 18th, we have 2 fantastic speakers who have experienced product in companies at different stages. RSVP now
What does product leadership entail at various sizes of organisations? How do you transition to 1st product person at a startup? What’s the same and what’s different at various sized companies in different stages?
We’ll kick off at 6:30pm with the Zoom open at 6:20pm. After the talks, we’ll utalise breakout rooms so you can say hello to folks! We hope you can stay & meet (or catchup with people you haven’t seen in a while).
Our Speakers:
Claire Sawyers Claire has an amazing background with product management in startups – having been the 1st product manager at a startup through to chief product officer building a team PLUS she has founded 2 startups.
Claire will talk about what it’s like to work at a startup – especially how to get the job – and how to survive it!
Steve Bladeni After years of product & strategy at large corporates (including in an innovation space), Steve went to a startup as the head of product/COO.
Steve will share how different – yet how things are the same – when you’re working in and scaling these various types of business.
Our Sponsor: A Cloud Guru We’re on a mission to teach the WORLD to cloud. A Cloud Guru is the largest online cloud school on the planet. Our training feels more like logging into Netflix or Spotify – it’s entertaining and playful. The people are the #1 reason employees say they stay at ACG. We’re a quirky, tight-knit crew that cares about our customers and each other. No egos here. Our leaders encourage thoughtfulness, compassion, being humble, and we have a bit of fun along the way.
We were super excited about our March event so it broke our hearts to reschedule Becoming (more) Brilliant with Impro. With things changing so quickly re: Covid-19 and new advice, it was most definitely the right answer. We will reschedule this session in the future.
So… we quickly decided to change the session into a roundtable discussion about our new reality of full-on remote working. A quick summary…
What were people enjoying about WFH?
no commuting
flexibility of the time as in being able to adjust hours
home cooked meals
ability to do chores at home during breaks
pets!
What is challenging?
Lack of whiteboard solutions
Overhearing conversations in the office (bc often it’s very valuable customer feedback or something related to what you work on)
Less time to focus because there are more meetings/catch-ups to make up for not being f2f
Being paranoid about being seen as ‘online’ and thus available all the time aka PEN syndrome (please everyone now)
Hard to see micro-expressions and the body language
The distraction of text chat happening in the meeting room at the same time as the meeting (yes, this happens F2F also but easier to get distracted when virtual)
If you didn’t have a remote team or WFH folks with a standard set of tools already, people have been receiving multiple invitations. This might feel like overload and could result in documents all over the place.
While many of us thought we’d have MORE time to focus, we find there’s even LESS focused time now because you need to increase your communication and there’s so many channels to reach you that you get interrupted more. They can’t see you’re busy or focused so you need to better manage this. Which leads to maybe needing better expectations around work hours & response times.
What we are missing
Spontaneous idea sharing
Having an expert within earshot
Water cooler conversations
Random social interactions
For those with kids at home… missing adult conversation
Reduction in drinking water
The commute – gives you time to think! To walk! To see people!
How to keep that social thing happening
Virtual lunch with your team
Friday pub drinks over Zoom
Host a trivia quiz
3 minutes of squats every day virtually!
Plant competition
Leave a Zoom room running all day (ie water cooler chat)
Acknowledge pets & kids joining calls
Contests of best virtual background
Making a conscious effort to reach out to individuals
Tools mentioned
Krisp for filtering out background noise during your calls
Mural & Jamboard (part of GSuite) for collaboration
Last year in April, we decided to have a social event instead of a talk – because with all the holidays and school holidays, people were away. We decided to do a dumplings evening at a place on Lt Bourke instead.
This year …it’s looking like we have the beginnings of an April tradition. 😉
This Monday April 6th, we’ll virtually host a BYO Dumplings (& bevvy) evening. No speaker… we’ll chat, catch up & get to know each other.
If you’re on the ProdAnon slack, details will be posted in the dumplings channel (yes, we have had a dumplings channel for almost 3 years…..)
Join the ProdAnon slack for more details and session login details. http://bit.ly/2vXZ4mS
FYI, there is a meetup in the calendar but we’re not using it for RSVPs.
AND .. we’ll be announcing the usual April event soon.
The other Thursday we heard from Josh Centner, Head of Product & Delivery at PageUp about their journey to being a product-led company.
Josh started with a bit of background. PageUp began in 1997 as a custom software house building various things which translates into a very sales led company. Over time they realised companies often had the same issues and even the same requests which is when they decided to focus on building recruitment software. For years, the company grew – people, teams, features, products, revenue – though still was quite sales led.
They realised they needed to make a change if they were going to continue to grow and move faster. They had previously been the fast mover in the industry but the industry had changed with lots of big and small players making a difference. Shifting to a focus on product-market fit rather than custom features for clients which only work for that client was a key part of the change to stay ahead.
Josh outlined the pillars to work.
Starts with people – Ensure everyone is well prepared and supported from a skills, mindset and culture perspective
Process – Put metrics in place so you can understand if time is being lost and if improvements are working
Strategy – Your strategy needs a story
Culture – the culture at PageUp is amazing. Everyone is really nice, so it’s fun but people don’t hold each other accountable because they are worried about hurting someone’s feelings
Credit: Neha Jaiswal
As part of the people change and bringing teams together they focussed on creating cross-functional teams – which INCLUDED the sales crew. (In other words, sales needed to write their own Jira tickets!!)
In order to improve the process & start to shift culture, a couple of actons were taken. The company did a values assessment. This assessment was an important step to define where the company wanted to be and brought people together to define it. Turning the output of those sessions into statements was critical because it was the beginning of behaviour changes.
PageUp also ran innovation workshops and in-depth training on design thinking, jobs to be done and lean startup with the exec team. The goal was to make sure people at the top knew what was going on & could speak the same language as their team. While everyone across the company went through the training, some were not able to implement it right away. They were focused on business-critical work. This ended up being a mistake because, by the time those folk had a chance to put their training into practice, it was very much forgotten.
With all this change, you want to show progress. Josh used delivery metrics at first because they change quickly – you can see speed improving, output, costs going down, and begin to see predictability come into the work. The product metrics Josh used were the HEART framework to help link to the lagging indicators of retention, growth & costs. This brought comfort to the organisation and allowed room to invest in risk & new areas of product innovation.
In terms of building out the product strategy ensure you’ve covered your compelling boundaries –
Story so far
Under attack
Purpose of this approach right now
Markets and customers
Deepening the competitive advantage
What would Josh do better next time:
Have metrics ready before starting the transformation. Start tracking as soon as possible!
Baseline the needed skills and have a long-term plan
Have a strong product strategy ready to go as you roll-out to ensure alignment & enable autonomy
Josh has spent the last 10 years knee-deep in the world of startups and innovation. Attempting his own startups and consulting to both small and large organisations intent on creating disruption for themselves and their industries. After working with over 20 different organisations, Josh has deep insight into what does and doesn’t work when it comes to organisational transformation and product management.
Thank you to our Host: UniSuper
At UniSuper, our mission is simple—helping our members enjoy exceptional retirement outcomes underpins everything we do.
Product transformation is easy and everyone in our organisation is both excited and happy to be on the journey….
This sounds far fetched but is the reality of what’s happened at PageUp. Josh Centner, Head of Product will walk through the journey of PageUp – a successful Melbourne based software company and how they went from a custom software house to a fast paced, customer focused product company.
Josh will cover their approach to introducing organisational transformation and how the organisation has combined the best of Design Thinking and Lean Startup to revolutionise the structure, process and mindset that drives our strategy, operations and product development practices.
Structure, culture & process will be covered with a ‘what we did’ approach and how you can learn from their experience.
Our Speaker: Josh Centner, Head of Product at PageUp
Josh has spent the last 10 years knee-deep in the world of startups and innovation. Attempting his own startups and consulting to both small and large organisations intent on creating disruption for themselves and their industries. After working with over 20 different organisations, Josh has deep insight into what does and doesn’t work when it comes to organisational transformation and product management.
Our Host: UniSuper
At UniSuper, our mission is simple—helping our members enjoy exceptional retirement outcomes underpins everything we do.
Lately ‘outcome, not outputs’ is the subject of lots of conversation within product & agile circles. How do you know what those outcomes should be and what will truly support your customers?
RSVP for ProdAnon’s November session on Thursday November 21st to find out.
No single methodology will help you create the perfect product, but you can increase your odds by understanding people’s deep, messy thinking and reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to uncover and design for those reasons.
Developed by Indi Young, this framework helps you curb assumptions & cognitive bias through a bottom-up approach to data analysis. With less bias and greater clarity of opportunities, this approach will help you more closely align design possibilities to your customer’s needs and your organisation’s capabilities.
Our speaker, Tafida Negm will walk us through some of the important concepts within Mental Models after introducing what it is and why you should incorporate it into your toolkit. There will be a few activities to aid you in having a go and gaining some confidence in trying it yourself when you get back to the office.
About the Speaker
Tafida Negm is an independent Human-Centred Researcher and Designer coming from a Marketing and Psychology background. As a consultant, she has gained a wide variety of experience across for purpose and commercial contexts helping lead teams from discovery through to launch. Witnessing the value research has delivered in shaping products and services, she has been on a mission to continually hone her research skills. Having spent the past year learning from Indi Young she is passionate about spreading her love of problem space research.
RSVP now. Doors open at 6:00 pm. Talk starts 6:30 pm
Steve Bauer kicking off the 10th Product Camp Melbourne
Saturday August 24th was our 10th birthday and a big thank you to all the sponsors, speakers volunteers and attendees to made it a lovely day!
It is always a fantastic time when the tribe of people who care about making great products gets together and (if you ask me) Camp is the best day of the year for gaining new knowledge, sharing with others, meeting new people, catching up with friends and ex-colleagues and so much more.
Thanks to some amazing volunteers and attendees, we can share these notes from sessions you may have missed. If we’ve missed yours, add it in the comments. We’ll add more as volunteers send them in.Â
NPS is global phenomenon which we are told to ignore at our peril – but maybe it’s all pseudoscience!
When the concept of a single survey question to ask and a single number to track to gauge the health of your market offering was introduced to the world 15 years ago, it was to huge acclaim.
Today, it has become the default measure for many organisations, So well-established that so few of us stop to ask why we’re using it.
Daniel will take us back 15 years to the birth of NPS – what was the origin? What was the original intention? Then look at how it’s used now, where it might actually be useful and how it’s misused!
He’ll also talk to how we move forward with actionable measures that will make a difference.
Daniel will cover:
Understanding where NPS makes sense & how we should best employ it
NPS methodologies
Why NPS is probably not the right tool for product managers
Quantitative and qualitative measures that help us drive product development
Our Speaker: Daniel Kinal has been in product management for over 16 years, chiefly working in IT with a focus on B2B products & services.
He began his career in marketing, communications and consulting but soon learned that the aspect of marketing he loved most was working out what to build, for whom and why.
He gets excited about helping businesses become more effective in decision-making, more efficient in their processes and more engaged with their customers. Daniel is at his happiest when waving his arms about in front of a whiteboard with a bunch of smart people, exploring problems and weighing up solutions.
He is passionate about product management as a discipline and is intrigued by how businesses, large and small, grapple with the innovation, collaboration and the measuring of value.
Grant Hatamosa is the first employee of Zen Ecosystems, a hot upstart in the cleantech/smart grid industry. Grant has worn multiple hats through his journey of becoming Zen Ecosystems Vice President of Product. He was a call centre agent, field technician, manufacturing manager, and operations & support manager on top of his actual role as Product Manager. He currently spends his time on Business Development & Product Management preaching the gospel of energy efficiency to customers in the US and Australia. Prior to his stint at Zen Ecosystems, Grant was a lead software developer for Planet Innovation, a company that was awarded Australia’s Most Innovative Company for a number of years. He also had stints in Singapore and the Philippines for NXP Semiconductors and Lexmark Research and Development respectively.
Shannon Gilleland is a project manager come entrepreneur who earned her stripes not only managing schedules across 12 international teams, for a global games company, but from getting her virtual hands dirty in the e-commerce business setting up and running multiple online businesses. She’s now putting her entrepreneurial, project management and problem solving skills to good use by helping solve one of the worlds plastic pollution problems as well as helping her fellow parents travel easier with a baby.
Carl Rigoni is the founder & CEO of SixSix. With a strong track record in successfully managing portfolios of digital and traditional businesses, generating revenues in excess of $1B, Carl is a leading force in helping our clients achieve their economic goals in the digital landscape. Carl also has extensive experience in building multiple cross functional digital incubation teams to facilitate innovation and Enterprise transformation agendas. Furthermore, he has launched highly successful disruptive products such as an award winning Whereis Mobile Application, Sensis1234, and a national Digital Change of Address Notification service.
