Come along on May 25th to get an insider’s perspective on engineering teams. What motivates them? Why do they ask so many questions? And why, for goodness sake, do they keep asking to rebuild things? 🙂
Building a trusted partnership with your engineers will help you nurture a product team that is more than the sum of its parts. So how do we better work with our eng team mates? Kate Lanyon will give us some insider tips!
Kate Lanyon, Engineering Manager at Fastmail, co-founder & former CTO of Eugene Labs will share insights into the above. Kate has a led a varied career – going from full stack development, to mobile app development and back again before moving into senior leadership. She has worked with teams across many different domains including agencies, start ups and corporates. You can fund musings at her website.
Our Host:
Kogan.com is a pioneer of Australian eCommerce. We are a dynamic and rapidly growing business. Our team believes in using & building technology to improve the online shopping experience for our customers. We are pragmatic, intelligent, fast paced and driven by seeing our software shipped to production daily. The software we build – including www.kogan.com – is used by millions of customers. Check out our pride and joy https://devblog.kogan.com/ to learn more about us and how we deliver amazing products and software!
Join us in April to hear about being product led and how to take steps to get there. RSVP
Amy Johnson, Chief Product Office at Propel Ventures, will dive into this ‘product led’ thing with us. What is it? How does it look day to day? How can you be ‘product led’ if your company is not?
Amy will share stories from the trenches about how she’s help shift orgs towards being product-led. She’ll ensure we’re using agreed language about what it means to be product-led and what it is not. And talk to the 5 aspects you need to see to know you’re making headwind. She’ll share some practical tips to get started on your own or as a team lead, but acknowledge the small wins to show you’re on your way and not give up when you realise how much further you’ve got to go. This stuff is hard to do so let’s help each other out!
Amy is a product leader, passionate about empowering teams and fostering inclusion. Multi industry experience, now leading the product team at Propel, who partner with you to accelerate your product development and achieve product market fit faster.
Our wonderful friends at Everest Engineering will be our hosts for the evening.
Does your company have a product management capability framework or career ladder? As a leader have you built or contributed to one? As a product manager, how do you know if you’re doing a great job or ready for the next step?
Our SpeakerAaron Hardy, VP of Product at PageUp, will share his experience of creating a company-specific framework for evaluating the capabilities of a product management team at various levels. He will explore publicly available resources and provide examples of how to apply the framework. Additionally, he’ll talk about how individuals can create a framework & take initiative in their own professional development.
Think of us as a strategic product development partner. At Propel, we know that building a successful product is more than just a technical and functional feat, it takes skillful and purposeful strategy and implementation to ensure users love it and your business profits from it. That’s why, unlike other development partners, we truly partner with our clients, helping them focus on discovering and building the right product for the right market. Our depth of experience in determining product-market fit, validating development progress with user testing and feedback, and supporting ongoing growth make us the ideal strategic partner for developing a commercially successful product. Propel’s services include product strategy, product management, product development, UX & UI design, go-to-market and product scaling.They are always keen to work with great people so if you’re looking check out more about them.
Lexicon recently created an NFT marketplace with a global sporting brand and will share their experience including:
1. Designing with NFT utility 2. Flexibility, scalability and experimentation 3. The importance of speed to market in a constantly evolving landscape
Our speakers:
Lexicon folks who worked on this project – Jan Erasmus – Principal Delivery Consultant and Oliver Newberry – Lead Product and UX Designer
Our hosts:
reecetech is building a world-class engineering culture – designing and building products our customers and staff love, and solving hard problems using the latest technology. We pride ourselves on being entrepreneurial, non-hierarchical, fast (you can be deploying code to production on your second day here!) and creating massive impact by powering the Reece Group.
As product managers, we spend a lot of time on understanding customer problems, assessing ideas and opportunities and focusing on getting that new product delivery process just right. We follow up with launch parties, launch emails and celebrations. New things are always exciting, right? Look at us delivering great stuff to our customers!
But sometimes, delivering great value to customers or business, actually means sunsetting a product or a feature. So:
how do you approach such a task?
how should you even make that decision?
once the decision is made, what needs to happen?
There are different reasons to sunset a product & Ana’s talk, will have something for everyone. Ana will take us through her experiences of sunsetting different products, as well as look at some industry examples, and share her learnings.
Ana Rowe is a Lead Consultant in Product Management at Thoughtworks, in their Customer Experience Service Line.
She has a great passion for customers. So much that she had a short career in market research and has a Masters degree in Marketing – and then realised that research alone is not enough to deliver great customer experiences.
Ana was one of the first Product Managers at SEEK, and has been working in product for over 15 years across Australia’s leading digital organisations of all shapes and sizes, such as SEEK, REA, A Cloud Guru and more. You can follow her at @anarowe
Our Host:
Kogan.com is a pioneer of Australian eCommerce. We are a dynamic and rapidly growing business. Our team believes in using & building technology to improve the online shopping experience for our customers. We are pragmatic, intelligent, fast paced and driven by seeing our software shipped to production daily. The software we build – including www.kogan.com – is used by millions of customers. Check out our pride and joy https://devblog.kogan.com/ to learn more about us and how we deliver amazing products and software!”
So you’ve completed your customer interviews – but now what?
How do you make sure that you’re creating the right insights based on all of your data? How do you advocate for your findings across product development, especially when they conflict with business objectives?
In this presentation, Jess will share how to set yourself up for success in the most important part of the user research journey – After Research. Learn how to effectively synthesise your qualitative data, create reusable and actionable insights & advocate your research across your team.
Jess Nichols – Principal, Research & Insights, Pluralsight Jess is a research leader at Pluralsight (formerly A Cloud Guru), where she helps teach the world to cloud. She has spent the past decade focusing on discovering actionable insights through qualitative research approaches to ensure customer centricity across the product journey. Throughout her career she has worked globally, including several years based in San Francisco, working for companies such as Twitter, Uber and Deloitte.
Our Host:
TBD – we’re working out if this will be via zoom, in person or hybrid
Come and join the Australian Product Management community for a massive social and informative event as we discuss some ideas about what it means to be “Product-Led”.
This years Product Party unites the communities of Product Talks, Product Women, Product Mavens, Product Book Club and Product Anonymous – this is the one meetup to join them all!
What is the theme? The topic for our special guest speakers to address will be: “Can you have Product Led Growth without a Product Led Culture?”
In addition to the hosted speakers and Q&A opportunities there will be fun networking events and giveaways.
Where is the Event? The Product Party will be an online event via Zoom so we can bring together several cities. You must pre-register with the zoom link provided once you RSVP to access the event.
Event Sponsor –Amplitude.com This year’s Product Party is proudly sponsored by Amplitude. Amplitude is a product analytics platform that helps businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform uses behavioural reports to understand users’ interactions with products and provides insights to accelerate work on a real-time basis. Website: https://amplitude.com/
November is the ProdAnon birthday! RSVP for November 18th!
Over the years, we’ve mixed it up with purely social birthday drinks to give you more time to get to know each other (& Liz and I are not averse to a lovely cocktail or wine) or the usual speaker topic session – but last year we tried something different and it worked well so here we go…
One of the big reasons Product Anonymous exists is to share knowledge. Another reason we exist is to grow the local talent which includes giving people the opportunity to gain experience in front of a crowd & crafting a talk. We’re super proud that several ProdAnon speakers have gone on talk at large conferences like Leading the Product & Web Directions.
So what is this November thing? It’s time to dip your toe in the water. Yes, you!
We want you to present – for 5 minutes. It’s not a long talk, you won’t have to answer 15 questions after, nor do you need to create earth-shattering beautiful slides.
What you need to do is know what you want to express, to teach, to explain, to get ProdAnon folks excited about.
You need to be able to communicate that in FIVE minutes (warning: Liz will have her whistle). And you need to be available to do this on Thursday evening November 18th.
This is not a ‘lightning talk’. You do not have to change slides every 15 seconds and have only 20 slides. It’s your 5 minutes. It can be fun. It can be serious. It could be an insight you want to share.
What to do next?
– Mull over your idea and submit it by EOD Saturday, October 23rd – Those chosen will be contacted on Friday, October 29th (yes, this is encouraging you to spend Melbourne Cup wknd working on your preso!)
How will talks be selected? – Appeal of the topic to ProdAnon people – Your sworn ability to be able to use google slides and deliver the slides the week before the event
Not interested in giving a talk?
Then come along to support your product peeps and hear some interesting talks!!!
Product Led Growth (PLG) has become a bit of a buzz word in recent times but what does it really mean? How does it impact companies using the methodology and the product people who work within that methodology? RSVP
PLG means the actual product drives user acquisition, expansion, conversion and retention. That means company-wide alignment across teams – from engineering to sales and marketing – around the product as the largest source of sustainable, scalable business growth
Dave McManus will share his lived experience of working with this space. He’ll share experiments he’s run, success and failures and tips for how you can influence others in your company to move towards PLG.
When:
Thursday, October 21st on Zoom – 6:20pm ‘doors open’ to say hello! 6:30pm we start. Bring along dinner, bubs, beverages
Dave McManus is an experienced product professional with over 12 years experience. He loves working with multidisciplinary teams to solve problems through thoughtful design and engineering solutions.
He has had the pleasure of working with many great companies from large fortune 500’s like: Microsoft, The North Face and Proctor and Gamble to name a few. Originally from Melbourne, Dave also lived in San Francisco for 5 years and founded a digital healthcare company and worked with many different startups including NextVR (acquired by Apple), Innit, Cool Effect (kickstarter for climate change) and many more.
He’s passionate about product led growth and looking forward to sharing stories with you all.
Cogent – cogent.co – If you need great people to help build your product, we do that and a whole lot more. Over the years, we’ve worked on more 100 digital products loved by millions of users, from small startups through to tech giants like Square, Xero and REA.
So whether you’re leading a small product team or the CPO of a growing tech company, our focus is on supporting you to design and develop products that your users love.
Daniel Kinal is a long haul product manager having been in the industry for awhile. Over the years, Daniel realised one of his strengths was being able to shape-shift.
Daniel talked about the various ways product managers are asked to shape shift. We might need to do some copy writing or sketch out a UI or develop a GTM plan or do a sales demo or create some reporting and do data analysis or manage a team or be the scrum master or even CODE (?!??!!!!!!!!).
The list of what we might end up doing goes on & on! There’s always gaps to fill and as a product person, we often feel like we need to help out to make sure our product becomes successful.
But then Daniel realised this might not be a strength. Our jobs are already hard without adding additional work. Shape shifting isn’t the best thing for him – nor the company he works for.
Why? Because we product folks need to focus on the ‘kernal’ – what Daniel calls the true product work. This includes
building trust & alignment
maximising value in a sustainable way
doing course correction
and more! (watch the video)
The thing about the ‘kernal’ is, it’s our job. While all these other shape shifting tasks can be done by others (others who hopefully exist at your company), doing the kernal isn’t done by others.
To help us, Daniel has a few meditations on our shape shifting nature…
Product Anonymous would like to thank Daniel for a great talk & convo after. No matter where you are in your product career, you should consider his insight and questions to ponder.
Resources
Daniel Kinal – The Shape Shifting PM – (had a baffling zoom thing happen & DK’s video isn’t appearing)
Our Speaker
Daniel Kinal has been in product management for over 18 years, chiefly working in IT, focusing on B2B products & services.
He began his marketing, communications, and consulting career 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.
Our Sponsor
Cogent – cogent.co – If you need great people to help build your product, we do that and a whole lot more. Over the years, we’ve worked on more 100 digital products loved by millions of users, from small startups through to tech giants like Square, Xero and REA.
So whether you’re leading a small product team or the CPO of a growing tech company, our focus is on supporting you to design and develop products that your users love.
Next Up
Kate Edwards-Davis will be talking about saving your team (or rather, not saving them) from villians on September 30th. Details & RSVP links here.
