Author Archives: jen leibhart

March Wrap – Working remotely

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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
  • Milanote
  • Miro (aka Real Time Board)
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Freehand by Invision
  • Funretro.io
  • Pomodoro technique
  • For whiteboarding – Zoom & Teams
  • BlueJeans – video conferencing

BYO Dumplings Evening

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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.

February Wrap – Transitioning to a Product Led Company

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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 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.

Thank you to our Host: UniSuper

At UniSuper, our mission is simple—helping our members enjoy exceptional retirement outcomes underpins everything we do. 

UniSuper logo

Transitioning to a Product Led Company

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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. 

https://twitter.com/UniSuperNews
https://www.linkedin.com/company/unisuper

UniSuper logo

Using Mental Models for Product Success

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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

Product Camp 2019 Wrap-up

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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. 

Rebecca Jackson’s sketchnotes of several sessions during the day & notes

Remya Ramesh’s notes on Rich Mironov, Antony Ugoni, Andrea Ho, Chris Duncan, Amir Ansari and Georgia Murch

Nuvnish Malik‘s takeaways of the day including Antony Ugoni, Georgia Murch, Tom LeGrice, Amir Ansari & Josephine Maguire Rosier

Without sponsors, this day would not happen. This year we were excited to welcome:

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Net Promoter Score (NPS) – An exploration of science and pseudoscience

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During our September session, we’ll explore The Net Promoter Score (NPS). RSVP for Thursday September 26th with Medibank as our host.

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.

Our Host

Thank you to Medibank for hosting us!

RSVP now!

July event – Life & Times of an Entrepreneur

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This month we are talking with a panel of entrepreneurs about their journey in their space and the product skills they are picking up along the way.

RSVP for Thursday July 25th

A big thank you to our host – A Cloud Guru!!!

Our Speakers:

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.

Continuous Discovery – June wrap-up

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Caitlin Blackwell is the acting Head of Product for the candidate experience at SEEK. Caitlin joined us last Thursday to talk about continuous discovery and how SEEK is using this framework.

Caitlin talked to how you can generalise the product manager role into 2 areas – deciding what to build and then building it. Teresa Torres talks to how we have gotten really good at shipping quickly via Agile, Lean Startup and other frameworks. We haven’t had the same emphasis on deciding what to build – ie continuous discovery.

We risk wasted effort when we rush to building and don’t do the work to understand what is needed. We can build an MVP quickly but you might have to wait a while until you have a good enough sample size or feedback to keep moving forward or realise you don’t have the right solution.

Caitlin believes discovery is all about being able to make better decisions through the product process. There’s several reasons we make bad decisions (aka the villains) including lack of clarity on the problem, being overconfident, etc.

A part of Teresa Torres’ framework they use is opportunity maps. This visual mapping lets you clearly state the outcome you want (linked back to your OKRs of course!), show the customer needs and show several solutions that may help you reach the goal.

Speaking to customers is key. Caitlin said their teams (ux & product combined) do 5 customer interviews every fortnight with a standup at end of day to share insights with the rest of the team. It’s important to talk to customers to learn about them, not only test out ideas.

The map helps to visualise the situation though you still have work to do in order to decide which customer opportunity and solution to move forward with. After sizing the opportunity to decide which to explore, you should ideate & validate assumptions through experiments.

Caitlin walked through one example where the OKR was to increase the SAT score of a particular customer segment. She shared some of the tools and ways SEEK walks through continuous discovery. (See the slides at the end this article)

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Once you’ve decided which opportunity to go after, it’s time to ideate & validate. There are different tools you can use to experiment and test your ideas (slide 21 has a list).

A few tips:

  • Spend 5 minutes a day to brainstorm. Frequently spending a short time is less cognitively draining than an hour brainstorm!
  • Do what you can to learn quickly in order to move forward. Talking with 2 customers is better than no customers. You can still learn something from those 2 (sample size is important but you can learn and be smart about what you’re hearing from small numbers)
  • Map your assumptions! Decide how you validate/disprove each of them.

During the talk, Caitlin gave us a few examples of how using continuous discovery can help create better products.

First up a product fail. When launching a new product which employers did not have access to, they came up with an ‘access code’ solution process to assist. The team ran an experiment to test the process but didn’t test their assumptions enough before launching – particularly really questioning the desirability and usability of a long process. The sales team’s feedback from employers was it is difficult to change behaviour without showing the value of doing so.

A win… SEEK wanted to introduce the ability to search for jobs by commuting distance. They listed their assumptions, what data they needed to assess risk and how they’d get that quickly. Testing made them realise it’s not just distance in km that’s relevant to job seekers as 10k on a tram vs a highway trip is very different time wise. Experimenting allowed them to dig deeper into understanding the candidate need.

How can you get started with continuous discovery?

  • Talk to users frequently. Ask them how they use your product.
  • Decide what metric you want to shift. This could be your OKR.
  • When ideating, go broad. Go for quantity. You can narrow later.
  • Do some sort of assumption mapping before you start building. Even if it’s listing out assumptions without a framework.

To Learn More

Caitlin recommends the following:

Thank you!

A big thank you to Caitlin for sharing, for RMIT Online for hosting, the fantastic ProdAnon volunteers and all attendees!

Join us for our next events in July – The life and times of an entrepreneur and then our special event for Leading the Product – Pitchfest. See you there!

Special Event: Leading the Product Pitchfest

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Leading the Product (aka LTP) is in its 5th year! We hope to see you there on October 17th.

Along with bringing together international and local speakers for a day of product management goodness, this is the 2nd year they’re welcoming you to pitch for one of their lightning talk spots.

So if you’d like to present to ~500 product professionals, we’re hosting a LTP Pitchfest to give you the chance to do exactly that! If you’re not interested in pitching, please come along and support those who are. RSVP

First, we’ll hear from the folks who did Lightning Talks last year. Daniel Kinal, Shiyu Zhu and Jen Leibhart will talk about their lightning talk experience in planning, practicing and getting up there!

Then, it’s your turn! Those of you interested will get 90 seconds to pitch what you’d like to talk about at LTP. No slides… just you sharing with the crowd & judges. To reiterate… you are NOT doing the lightning talk but just pitching your idea for a LTP talk.

At the end of the evening, 2 people will be selected to present a Lightning Talk at Leading the Product 2019. Selection is based on the judges’ vote (judges to be announced)

RSVP now!

I WANT TO PRESENT! WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?

You should rsvp for this session and then tell us you’re interested via this form.

WHAT IS A LIGHTNING TALK?

It is a five minute presentation, with 20 slides that advance automatically. You can see the video of the three Lightning talks from Leading the Product Melbourne 2017.

Thanks to our LTP sponsors Brainmates and Seek for making this event happen.

Brainmates