Last month we had startups and this month we’re going to the other end of the spectrum with our topic – Innovating in Large Enterprises.

According to this HBR article, large companies are bad at being innovative because they are designed to be bad at innovation. They measure success by profit, not product/market fit. Efficient operation that leverages existing assets, distribution channels & focuses on their best customers will help profit, repeatable & scalable will help profit – not the risk of innovation.

Our panel will talk about their experiences in innovating at large enterprises & answer your questions. We’ll be discussing:

• How do you make room for failure? Getting resources for the project vs covering your ass. How can we overcome the fear of failure
• Making time for innovation. You need to have time to think strategically but there might be a big problem if you’re not delivering. How do you balance the two?
• How should your KPIs change if you’re trying to be more innovative?
• What steps can you take tomorrow to change things?

Our Facilitator: Daniel Kinal – Daniel has been in product management for over 12 years, chiefly working IT with a focus on B2B products. He’s passionate about helping businesses become more effective in decision-making, more efficient in their processes and more engaging with their customers.

He 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’s passionate about product management as a discipline and is intrigued by how businesses, large and small, grapple with the sometimes elusive concept of innovation. He will guide us through the discussion and bring some challenging questions for our panellists.

Our Panel:

1. Jamie Skella – When we first started talking with Jamie about this event, he was deep in the land of large enterprises but has recently left for a startup 😉

Currently Director of Innovation and UX at a new tech startup, Jamie has dedicated over a decade to strategy and design for the likes of the AFL, Coles, Telstra, Tatts Lottery and TAB. His long held belief is that building the best digital products can only be achieved with an intimate understanding of your customers, the pursuit of simplicity, and the seizing of technological opportunity.

2. Andrew Niere – has led the Technology Innovation Fund at the State Government of Victoria and has managed innovation in government for over five years; he also founded and managed a game development business for a decade so is very familiar with the challenges of product management.

3. Mark Andrew – During a long career in senior IT management roles at Telstra, Mark Andrew delivered  a bunch of different applications including ops support systems and front of house CRM using a variety of then innovative approaches and techniques in the days pre-Agile. Mark also implemented Telstra’s first Usability lab in Telstra, using design-based thinking and usability observation tools to craft effective user experiences.

After leaving Telstra in the early noughties, Mark spent almost 9 years at Lonely Planet in various roles including LP’s IT Delivery Manager, and Digital Ops Director.  Mark played a key role in introducing Agile to LP and growing it’s lean and agile maturity. Mark is now in charge of Sensis’ Websites product.

While Mark would not call himself an innovator, he believes that innovation in even small ways should be an intrinsic part of our work lives, and should be fostered and nurtured at every opportunity.

RSVP now for Thursday June 18th. This month we’re being hosted and sponsored by Nintex.

“We’re fun. We’re hardworking. We’re friendly. We’re passionate about what we do. We’re Ninsters.”

Nintex are continually growing and always on the lookout for talented, passionate people who want to work for a company that encourages, supports and rewards you. Our culture embraces integrity, teamwork and innovation. Our work environment inspires your best work. Fresh thinking is not only encouraged, but expected. Innovative ideas, excited conversation and impactful projects are all in a day’s work here.

Often it seems the product manager role is different depending on where you work, who you work with, what stage the company is in & the current understanding of the value of product management.

Three companies will share how they work and manage product – their structure, how they work with other teams, their challenges and how the team brings value to the business. Each company will give a short presentation on their area and then we will throw to the audience for questions.

Redbubble – will talk about the differences and likenesses between physical and web product development. Nick Cust, Product Director and Vicki Stirling, Physical Product Director will talk about each of their sides of the business to dive into the similarities and the distinction between them.

Envato – Envato boasts a community of over 5 million creatives, but dedicated Product Management is a relatively new concept for the company. While growing a team alongside rapid expansion in engineering, the Product team at Envato continually focus on better ways to meet the needs of their highly talented and passionate global community. Luke Meehan, Product Manager and Stewart Boon, Product Director will talk about how they get things done with a global, two sided community of authors and buyers.

Zendesk – Zendesk has 20 scrum teams on 4 different continents building customer service software. In his short presentation Aaron Cottrell will outline what has worked, what hasn’t and where Zendesk is continuing to improve as a globally distributed product company.

A big thank you to Redbubble for being our hosts for the evening! RSVP here.

Liz & I are very excited about our March session on visual communication (ok, we get really excited about all of our sessions but can you blame us for having such amazing speakers?!).

So much of the product manager job is communicating and since we deal with so many different groups in the business, we need to be able to communicate differently. This month, Rebecca Jackson, will help us communicate more visually…

Thursday March 19th

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Our brains are wired to understand and remember images more than words, so how can we put forward our ideas visually to take advantage of the way our brains work? Rebecca Jackson, sketchnoter and visual communicator, will share how we can use visual note taking in meetings, presentations and life to explain, influence and remember.

Rebecca will cover:

• Why visual communication is awesome
• How to introduce it into your work & life
• Tools, tips & resources
• Real time practice, try sketching for yourself in the session

If you’ve sketched a wireframe, you have effectively used visuals to assist in communicating a shared vision. Take the next step and RSVP now for March 19th.

Rebecca Jackson is a Social Media Manager by day, visual communicator by night. She has a background in Intranets, Marketing and Retail and an interest in change management and user experience design. After recently re-discovering her love of visual communication she spends much of her spare time sketching. She’s also a bit of a sci-fi nerd who is known to jog and practice yoga.

Note: We recommend you bring along your notebook and pen(s) of choice so you can participate in this interactive session. (We will have on hand if you forget).

There was a session at Product Camp this year about breaking into Product Management for those who are new to product management or are looking for their first product management job. If you missed that session or want to hear more, check out a free session from General Assembly this Thursday, January 22nd.

It’s a panel discussion with our very own Liz Blink and if you’ve been to any Product Anonymous sessions or Product Camp, you’ll recognise other faces like Adam Fry from Sportsbet and Laura Cardinal from Xero.

If you are looking for Product Management jobs then follow us on Twitter @product_anon

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There are a lot of similarities between Product Managers and UXers in how we think and the work we do but we also see things differently.

So on Feb 19th, we’re hosting:

Product Managers are from Pluto* and UXers are from Uranus – a practical guide for improving communication and getting what you want from your relationships

Hear from a panel of Product & UX folks and their secrets of working collaboratively with each other including:

• How they work together as a team

• What works? What doesn’t?

• Where are the potential conflict points between Product & UX – and how to prevent them!

• How they’ve changed their approach over time

The panel will take questions too – tweet #prodanon if you’re shy 🙂

6pm for 6:30pm start, and pizza & beverages sponsored by our lovely hosts Aconex.

Our Panel:

Aconex –  Mark Smith / Senior Product Manager & David McNamara / UX Designer

MYOB –  Russell Kallman / Senior Product Manager & Scott Turner / UX Design Lead

Seek –  Nicole Brolan / Product Manager & Vedran Arnautovic / Senior User Experience Designer

99designs – Susan Teschner / Product Manager & Catherine Hills / User Experience Designer & Researcher

REA – Chris Kwan / Consumer Product Manager & Ricky Synnot / Senior Experience Designer

*The ‘object’ formerly known as the Planet

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If you subscribe to our Google Calendar, you might notice we’ve added the dates for Product Anonymous’ evening sessions in 2015 – starting with February 19th.

Things are already starting to fall into place for an exciting panel discussion on the 19th.  More details to come early in the new year.

If you’re not subscribed to our Google Calendar, go to our Events page and click the ‘add calendar’ button on the bottom right of the embedded calendar.

Hello all,

Liz & I have been so busy with Product Camp Melbourne that I just realised we haven’t updated the website with ProdAnon happenings!

Due to camp, we’re not having an evening talk in October but there will be a coffee on TUESDAY the 21st at noon (so a coffee/lunch) at Little Mule. Note the different day as some folks said Thursdays aren’t good for them.

And as usual, November will be our end of the year party. It’s an evening to talk about product and so much more on a rooftop somewhere (as long as Melbourne behaves!).

Usually we take a break while there’s too many xmas parties to attend and people are out of town but we’re going to have 1 more very special session this year – join us on Thursday December 4th in welcoming Rich Mironov to town & ProdAnon.   We’re really excited about being able to have Rich join us. We’ll have more details soon re: topic & location.

Our usual speaker evenings will start back up in February 2015.

If you’re feeling a void of professional conversation at the Christmas parties, come along to one of our coffees scheduled for both November 26 (breakfast) & December 18 (lunch) plus there’s always the monthly newsletter for some ProdMgmt intel.

And you may have noticed we have a new logo. We’ve been using the ‘keep calm’ crown visual since day 1 and figured after almost 3 years, we needed our own identity. We hope you like it.

Last Thursday evening, we had a full house for Rob McLellan & Will Fettke from Telstra Design Practice to talk about understanding your customer through design thinking and customer journey maps.

Customer Journey Maps document your customer’s end-to-end experience in order to understand how they interact with you. Maps will help identify areas that need improvement but they can do much more – use them to help shape your roadmap,  prioritise the backlog or even find pain points that need to be mitigated before launch.

Of course, this is also another tool to help you understand your customer! Try using the map as a communication tool to help your entire team (or company) have more empathy towards the user.

The map visually represents the experience with information like customer goals, touch points, the customer’s emotions and more. Internally, since the maps are highly visual and often on a wall, they get more interest than a text document sitting in email.

During their time at Telstra, Rob & Will have seen a company wide shift towards understanding the value of design thinking including helping to guide strategy. When the internal teams have been involved in mapping, there’s no need to sell the learnings to them… they have personal experience in creating the learning. Rob & Will have witnessed how the maps enable people to have empathy for the customer, even when that requires them to swallow their pride. Out of all the design thinking tools, they use customer journey maps the most at Telstra.

Rob pointed out the value of these tools come at the upfront stage – to guide you to the problem space and getting everyone to think about it in the same way. Customer journey maps are not going to help you with the interface. Rob said the other big value is using this tool to help identify the opportunities to take it to the next level.

Maps are great for showing nothing happens in isolation. One thing the guys have witnessed is anything you do with customers is ‘a conversation’. An advert, text on a bill, etc come back as ‘Telstra told me’. A great insight for so many parts of the business!

When starting a project, Rob & Will have their stakeholders map the experience first to get the internal view of what’s happening then they they map the experience with customers. Looking at the gaps between those 2 maps are some of the most valuable pieces of information.

As usual at a Product Anonymous session, it was time for the audience to get involved.  Rob & Will outlined our task – to redesign an experience such as shopping or public transit.

First we had to take over other sections of the bar so we had enough space 🙂 Then each group had to define what experience to work on. Our groups went with:

• going to Oaks Day
• renting a car
• dealing with a lost myki
• buying tickets for the Grand Final
• finding a job/recruitment
• renting a car for a business trip

They mapped out the experience then broke the experience into themes. Next, they looked at touch points along the timeline which lead into emotions and pain points. To finish up, each group focused on 2-3 really painful things and how they could solve them.

Some examples:

Themes for attending Oaks Day include organisation, preparation, arrival, interacting and leaving.

Touch points of finding a new job included: coffee chats with recruiters, searching online, going to meetups, lots of time at your computer crafting cover letters & resumes.

Emotions & pain points for dealing with a lost myki card include: annoyance, relief & satisfaction, frustration, confusion, more annoyance, more confusion and finally more frustration!

Each group presented their experience map & solution.

Mapping

Rob & Will gave a summary before we broke out into groups & coached each group though the process. For those who weren’t able to attend – here’s an overview!

Using your post-its, write out all the things that happen during the experience from the customer’s perspective. Moving the post-its around, you can put them in time sequence within a swim lane. Include items like who they interact with, how long the interaction lasted, direct quotes, etc.

Use the 5 E’s to help explain the experience:

• Entice – how does the customer become aware
• Enter – how does the customer begin the engagement with your service
• Engage – what are the points of interaction they can have with you and your offering
• Exit – how does the experience close out
• Extend – how could you extend the experience

Think about how you can cluster the steps into ‘episodes’.

Touchpoints – group the journey into the specific touchpoints they interact with you or your service, i.e over the phone, on a device, in a shop, whatever that might be. Draw out some of the emotions that might be felt by the customer at this stage. These steps can then be turned into customer needs, which leads to the discovery of pain points and real opportunity for change or improvement.

Look for the biggest pain points and brainstorm on how to solve those. At this stage be very open to any idea and only after you have put a lot of ideas forward narrow the options down again. Don’t kill ideas in the brainstorm phase as there are plenty of chances for narrowing the list down to only the most plausible.

The next step is to test out those ideas and see what will really work. Testing them can be as simple as a sketch. Will said they often put sketches in front of customers to test solutions.

Tips for Mapping

• Starting is the hardest part.
• Mapping takes time. Ensure you have committed time with stakeholders and time to both learn AND fail.
• Your maps will evolve over time.
• This isn’t rocket science! But it is a powerful tool to share with others in order to gain agreement & understanding.

Interested in learning more?

• The Anatomy of an Experience Map / Adaptive Path
• Designing CX

Thanks!!!

Thank you Rob & Will for taking the time to share your knowledge! Thanks to everyone who came along!  We hope to hear about mapping escapades soon! See you all at Product Camp on the 4th!!

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Design Thinking is a deeply human process that taps into abilities we all have but get overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional. It allows us to innovate and design products that customers will love to use.

Rob McLellan, from the Telstra Design Practice, is going to lead us in applying one tool from the Design Thinking toolkit, called Customer Journey Mapping.

The Customer Journey Map is:

• a visual tool for capturing and presenting key insights into customer interactions
• an important tool to build empathy with customers. A way to ‘step into the shoes of the customer’ by understanding their current reality.

The Customer Journey Map focuses on what makes us human; what we think, feel and do as we interact with a product, service or ecosystem.

What actions do customers take to meet their needs or goals?

How do customers evaluate their experiences?

What emotions do they have along the journey?

It distributes key insights in a form that is easy to understand, while promoting customer-centric thinking.

6pm for a 6:30pm start. RSVP now!

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