October – Helping Teams ‘do product’

What is the difference between a product team building a product and product teams ‘doing product’? As software companies scale and the product team grows, the difference between building ‘stuff’ and performing the practice of product management can be massive. It can greatly impact the ability to find product market fit through to the ability to scale with pace and grace.

Join us Thursday October 26th RSVP

Our speaker, Nick Wodzinski will share his experience of going from product hire #1 in startups & scale ups and working with teams building product to setting the formula for growing from 1 to many product teams. Nick will reflect on his experiences of setting up teams over the last 5 years with SignOnSite, EstimateOne, Mastt and Chargefox.

Our speaker:

Nick Wodzinski is the lead product manager at Chargefox – Australia’s largest public charging network for electric vehicles. His background is in construction tech, and he has worked setting up product teams with startups and scale ups over the last 5 years in the Australian software industry. Fast 5 Q&A with Nick

Our host:
Our wonderful friends at Everest Engineering will be our hosts for the evening.

Everest Engineering is a bold, people first community, building digital products for those who do things differently.

How to Dip Your Toe into the AI water

As a product manager, have you gotten caught into the AI frenzy? Or feel like you’re missing out and not sure where to start?

This month we’ll talk about how to make use of AI and tools like ChatGPT in your product world. RSVP for September 21st

– How to use Generative Ai in your workflow, i.e. pad out a persona

– How to incorporate it into an existing product i.e. Shopify launching Sidekick, a personal commerce assistant

– What could you do to build from the ground up with chatGPT, as an example. i.e. this is the hardest to predict at the moment as well but we can explore some of the future opportunities

Our speaker:

Tim O’Neill is the Co-founder of Time Under Tension. They help companies make sense of Generative AI and how it can be used for their products.

Find out more at www.timeundertension.ai and his LinkedIn profile.

Our host:

Thank you Catapult for being our September host!

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 optimize 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.

RSVP for September 21st

Product Camp 2023

Take your mind back to August 2019.. it was a bit chilly and we had 300 people interested in product all together for Product Camp. We celebrated 10 years of Product Camp in Melbourne, where Rich Mironov virtually spoke to us about the importance of community and history of Product Camps, Georgia Murch helped us understand feedback, Antony Ugoni shared his knowledge and experiences with bringing the data and about 20 of our community gave talks (after they pitched & the attendees voted on what they wanted to hear).

AND then there was that thing – that prevented us from gathering together.

But we’re excited to say… we’re back. Join us on Saturday August 5th (RSVP)!

Same familiar ‘unconference’ style event where we organise the venue and keynotes (including Ken Sandy and one TBA) and make sure you have some food and water during the day – but you (!) are active participants! You can pitch a talk idea, or run a panel discussion or ask for a working talk to help you work thru a problem.

For more details and to submit a talk idea, go to https://productcampmelbourne.com

NOTE: If Camp is at waitlist, we recommend you add yourself and check back in. As the day gets closer, numbers will change and spaces will become available. If you are one of the people who have RSVP’d but something has changed and you can’t make it, please change your RSVP to no so others can attend.

Making retention fun – how games get players coming back for more

RSVP for Thursday July 20th

Retention and engagement are often a key focus for product teams, and the games industry has some great insights into how they think about these 2 concepts to attract and keep their users.

While games have some unique difference to many products, the concepts in this talk are ones any product team can apply in their user journey. Retention is also not a once and done job, so thinking about opportunities to keep your customers engaged along the entire lifecycle of using your products will also be something discussed in this talk.

Our speaker:
Sebastian Pattom – Director at Product at Electronic Arts (EA) will share his experiences and knowledge of his work in the retention space.

Our hosts:
Canva is a global online visual communications platform designed to empower the world to design. We create beautiful designs from presentations to infographics, videos, t-shirts and social media graphics.

We recently launched the Canva Visual Worksuite – a suite of new workplace products and features built to empower anyone to communicate visually, on any device, from anywhere in the world.

We believe that our responsibility goes far beyond business as usual, and that what’s good for business can be good for the world: This is part of our two-step plan. We truly believe that good for humanity is good for business, and times are really changing around people’s expectations of what they expect from businesses. We’ve come a long way, though we believe we’re still only 1% of the way there.

Thanks Canva! Check out their current product jobs.

RSVP for Thursday July 20th. If your plans change and you can’t attend, please update your RSVP so people on the waitlist can attend. Thank you!

June Meetup: Just what ARE you getting yourself into????

You have decided you want to be a product manager and gotten that first job – or maybe you’re in your second PM role. Is it all you thought it would be?? What really have you gotten yourself into as a new product manager?!?

And this session is not just for folks who are new to product management! Folks who have been there … we need your wise words of wisdom and you’ll learn something new too!

This month, we’ve gathered a panel of new product folk (3 years or less) to share their stories of what their grappling with at the start of this career journey. We’ll be taking questions from the audience and guiding the discussion as we tap into this moment in time, that you never get back 🙂

There will be audience participation!!!

We’ll be running an interactive component to connect our more experienced PMs with the newbies in the room and facilitate some speed mentoring rounds between those starting out in their career and those with sage learnings to share.

Our panellists:

Hugh Osborne, Jane Card & Heike Radlanski

Jane Card is a career shifter into product after fifteen years helping organisations define problems, generate solutions, adopt new business models and ways of working.  Naturally curious and a people geek, Jane is passionate about leveraging different perspectives to make the world a better place.

Heike Radlanski started her career in digital marketing before moving into a product owner role and subsequently into product management. Passionate about understanding people’s needs and pain points, Heike enjoys the process of working in cross-functional teams to create and improve products that add value for those using them.

Hugh Osbourne moved to Product Management after working in design, product design, copywriting and small business jack-of-some-trades. He’s been in successful and failing startups (sometimes in the same week), assembling a impressive toolbox of hacks, workarounds and bad habits. Working now in a growing organisation, he’s interested in the secret sauce of small teams, why data products are the best products, and how to domesticate ‘wild’ PMs

Our hosts:

A big thank you to MYOB!

MYOB has been part of the fabric of doing business in Australia and New Zealand for more than 30 years, having grown from its status as the original Australian unicorn to now employing people across Australia and New Zealand, based out of nine locations in the region. Having started life as accounting software, MYOB has undertaken significant steps toward becoming a cloud-based business management platform that brings together key workflows to fit a business’s needs.

To see what it is like to be an MYOBelievers, check out our careers site.

Kicking Ass Together – Product & Engineering

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!

RSVP now for Thursday, May 25th

Our Speaker:

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!

What does ‘product led’ really mean?

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.

RSVP for April 20th.

Creating your own Product Management Capability Framework

Join us on Thursday the 23rd of February!

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 Speaker Aaron 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.

Thank you to our Event sponsor: Propel Ventures

Propel Ventures logo

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.

RSVP for Thursday, February 23rd

Creating an NFT Marketplace as a White Label Experiment

For our last event of 2022, we’re going to get first hand experience with an NFT product.

RSVP for in-person or online/zoom

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 ErasmusPrincipal Delivery Consultant and Oliver NewberryLead 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.

Products Don’t Last Forever

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.

RSVP for Thursday, June 23rd in person in South Melbourne or online via zoom (link coming)

Our Speaker

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!”