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!”

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!)

Submit your talk idea!

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!!!

RSVP for November 18th 6:20pm

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

RSVP

Our Speaker:

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.

www.djmgrowth.com
https://twitter.com/D_Mack7

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.

Does your team look up to you as some sort of super hero? Who they can rely on to swoop in and protect them from the maleficent deeds of some evil villain? Do you sometimes feel like a victim, a target for others to blame when things don’t play our as we forecast? RSVP

Ah! Welcome to the dynamics of drama! Our efforts to protect others may actually perpetuate a cycle of conflict and anxiety.

Would you like to better understand the common causes of drama & conflict in the workplace – and how you can interrupt that cycle with one of our favourite tools – a POST-IT NOTE!

RSVP to learn how to kill off that drama and setup a winning dynamic of success.

Thursday, September 30th 6:20pm via Zoom

Our Speaker:

Kate Edwards-Davis is a product manager at Karista.com.au

Kate circled around the profession of Product Management for many, many years – starting in the 1980s as an IT Project Manager, switching to Business Analyst, to Product Owner and then finally to Product Manager.

With all of those titles, Kate says she essentially played the same role – listening to the customer, getting to know their most important problems, then working with teams of super clever people to deliver a solution.

Random Kate facts!

• Kate once pursued a career as a classical musician. She performed solo in a national live broadcast on ABC classic FM. On recorder – yes, that instrument you all played in primary school.
• She danced with Prince in a small London nightclub.
• She has a collection of vintage calculators. They fit right into Kate’s very retro 1970’s house. (Wait til you see the fake wood paneling!)
• She has never ever managed to do a cartwheel.
• Her kids really don’t understand what she does for work, and frankly don’t care, as their Dad’s work is way cooler. He works in the design team for Moose Toys.
• She’s still not sure what what she wants to do with her career  

Our Sponsor:

Cogent

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.

In mythology and folklore, having the ability to change form has alternately been seen as a gift from the gods or as the foulest of curses. And, yep, it’s kind of the same with product managers.

Our roles are, by their very nature, not clearly defined compared to those of our co-workers. Freedom to focus on the things that matter from day to day is part of the job description. It’s absolutely glorious but it can also get us into some serious trouble if we’re not careful.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does a product manager. Our jobs naturally bump up against others in the organisation and it can be hard to tell where product management stops and functions like marketing, corporate strategy, design, research and execution start. And, as shapeshifters, we have a natural tendency to quietly fill the gaps when we see them.

This talk will cover which areas we sometimes need to extend our roles into, where we should step back, what we need to communicate about our jobs to our stakeholders and what we neglect at our peril.

Details:

RSVP for August 26 (zoom) login about 6:20pm for a 6:30pm kickoff

If we can do in-person, we’ll update on Meetup.

Our presenter:
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 – 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.

Right now we’re doing research on how product teams in Aus & NZ work best together. Participate in the survey to tell us all about it.

We love getting customer feedback – and there are some times we don’t love getting customer feedback! RSVP for Thursday July 22

Our speaker, Dipa Rao, will share her experiences of dealing with both
solicited AND unsolicited customer feedback. Dipa will discuss:

• setting the right expectations for getting feedback
• how to manage responses
• how to prepare for managing everything that comes your way including hippos & distressed customers!

RSVP for Thursday July 22nd

Closer to the date we’ll know if we can do this session as both in-person and online streaming.

Our Speaker

Dipa Rao is a Product Experience at Australia Post. She has worked as an Agile Coach and consultant at Elabor8 with clients such as Coles, UniSuper, Seek & the Alcohol & Drug Foundation. Twitter:@dipanjali 

Our Sponsor

Yellowfin is a global analytics and business intelligence (ABI) software vendor with a suite of world-class products powered by automation. Yellowfin is recognized as an innovator by the world’s leading analyst firms. More than 29,000 organizations and over 3 million end-users across 75 countries use Yellowfin every day. https://www.yellowfinbi.com/

Thursday, June 17th RSVP

Continuous discovery is often referenced as a way to build an organisational view of customer needs; ultimately bringing focus to solving the problems that add value for customers and by extension the business.

However, the road to building this ideal is neither straight nor clear. There are multiple obstacles, anchors and false starts, especially if you’re starting from a position where your organisation is neither wired nor ready for such a journey.

Over the last four years, FatSecret has inched toward a continuous discovery model that is by no means complete, but they’re getting closer to the end goal, and learned a lot along the way. This session will cover a few of their lessons, missteps and wins along the way.

Our presenter

Head of Product at FatSecret, Ben Ryan. 

Ben started in product when he applied for a Producer role at REA at the end of 2012. By the time he actually got hired, that role had become a Consumer Product Manager. Soon after, he got to be the guinea pig in an experiment to merge REAs Consumer and Customer Product Manager roles and didn’t dislike the change.

Later, after a year (possibly less) working in the Death Star (aka NAB’s 700 Bourke Street), he decided to take a punt on a company he’d never heard of and became the first Product Manager at FatSecret. They’d also never heard of a Product Manager, so there were lessons to be had by all. Since then, he’s helped the company launch a consumer offering and grow revenues by 60% YoY.

Try as he might, he can’t help but look down on people who use “learnings” in sentences…or in any form, for that matter.

Session Details

We are not sure if this will be a f2f/zoom or some combination of the two. When you RSVP, let us know your likelihood of joining Zoom or in-person.