Category Archives: events

June event: Innovation at Large Companies

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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.

nintex-logo

“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.

 

April wrap: How do *you* manage products?

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How we manage products can differ from company to company & we always like to hear how other firms do things. With that in mind, Product Anonymous last week got together to talk about how things are the same but different for product managers – even at the same company- as well as different workplaces.

Our panelists from Redbubble, Envato & Zendesk shared their backgrounds, personal experiences and how each of their companies are figuring out the best product management approach for them.

How do you manage products?

Redbubble

Nick Cust, Product Director and Vicki Stirling, Physical Product Director from Redbubble shared their areas of contention that arise working on product types that have a different life cycle.

Vicki and Nick have alot of overlapping similarities in their approaches – the customer always comes first, need to fit with business strategy & build their product strategy from there, metrics to target & to build a financial plan, product launch and learning from each delivery. All sounding good so far!

Some of the differences that stand out between the two are:

  1. Speed to market
    • Physical – must put more time into planning, development, sampling, because the product must work for 13M artworks
    • Digital – Instant feedback is a key difference and advantage here. To be able to use AB tests, or quick and dirty versions.
  2. Validation of opportunity
    • Physical – Based heavily on external market, trends and insights (Macro)
    • Digital – Analytics, effect on user behaviours (Micro)
  3. Data/Measurements
    • Physical – Sales & Profit
    • Digital – Numerous KPIs, different ways to cut data can be paralyzing

Zendesk

Aaron Cottrell, Product Manager (Customer Engagement) talked us through the spaghetti problem at Zendesk :-).

At Zendesk, product development occurs in 5 different countries across 4 continents with 17 product managers & 22 scrum teams. Some of the areas that make it difficult to keep product humming is how quickly the engineering teams are growing, getting the right priority alignment across teams and getting access to limited resources like infrastructure.

Collaboration can be tough considering the team’s geographical challenges & sometimes in-person sessions are the easier way to find synergy. Aaron shared with us some of the ways the company helps to overcome that including using Yammer as a tool for sharing and collaborating.

Sometimes it’s not just the differences in work practice that make it challenging to get product management done effectively. Zendesk has a wide range of customer needs – from SMBs to large enterprise customers. The very different needs of these opposite ends of the spectrum challenge the PM teams all the time – and even more so when the customer who was previously SMB gets to enterprise scale (i.e. Uber) as they experience growth. Adjusting the product approach as the customer market changes is an area Zendesk works on to continue to support all their customers yet stick to their beautifully simple philosophy.

A summary of some of challenges facing a PM at Zendesk:

  • Communicating internally – educate/excite (globally – sales and support as well as product and engineering), building key relationships, staying in touch
  • Maintaining ‘beautifully simple’ product philosophy – growing product footprint, need to carefully consider feature additions and lifecycle (from birth to end of life)
  • Serving SMB & Enterprise – Zendesk grew from SMB’s and now also has to meet the needs of Enterprise customers
  • Passionate, vocal customers – Understand their needs, engage with the community and take them on the produce development journey with you

Envato

Luke Meehan, Product Manager and Stewart Boon, Product Director talked us through the experience at Envato.

At Envato (as was true for all the PM’s talking tonight) product managers speak directly with the community. The advantages of this approach were clear, but Luke did share with us some of the difficulties with such an engaged community. If changes to the product are not shared early and with detail this can make it a lot harder to deliver updates as the community does not feel engaged. While this might seem obvious, it certainly keeps the team on their toes to remember that everything they are working on is of interest to their customers, not just the big ticket items.

Stewart explained that the company had gone through really rapid growth and thus had gone from not having or really needing governance and process. Areas of responsibility were unclear and they were lacking analytics functions to make good sense of their data. A good organisational understanding of “Product function” was distinctly missing and there was not an agreed way in which to interact and engage with community.

So how have they fixed it? Having all the necessary functions embedded in the same stream (i.e. Prod Mgr and UX), clarity about the role and value of product, and improved engagement and relationships within the Community through research, testing and the use of the forums. Luke believes the Envato values helped here. Any decision or call is linked back to community success which will lead to Envato success. This company value keeps the debate neutral not personal. Another Envato value is to tell it like it is – or as Luke put it – to be clear and honest about what is needed which helps get the work done.

Wrap-up


Great sketchnote from Lisa!

Some of the similarities we heard from each of the teams:

  • ood communication is required! Your colleagues or customers or both could be global – this emphasises the need for good communication
  • High engagement with your customers/communities helps build beautiful products for them, increases the importance of keeping the community informed vs. taking on every request as a new item on the backlog
  • Growth was a key theme for everyone and certainly forces the conversation about how to do product management (and dev, agile, marketing etc,). Everyone was obviously still on a journey of improvement, but it was great to get some insight into the things that were working well so far
  • Lastly, all three companies still have their founders very much involved in the day to day but all talked very positively about the position the product team has in the company to drive direction but ensure they are matched to the leaders’s vision.

Thanks once again to Redbubble for being such fabulous hosts – and to providing a great little door prize which was well received by Gemma Sherwood on the night.

Slides

 

Startup Session: xLabs – What are your users actually paying attention to?

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Product Management at a Startup – Startup Sessions

This month we invite local startup xLabs to share their MVP story.

After considerable time in the R&D stage & working with 1st adopter customers – the co-founders Joe Hanna and Steve Roberts – are looking to get their product into the market & continue working with an MVP mindset. xLabs are keen to share their experience, curious about how to keep focused on the launch & interested in hearing feedback from the product management & UX community.

With a unique technical ability, xLabs, provides valuable UX data via continuous real time tracking of eye & head movements using only a webcam instead of complex technical equipment. You can check out what xLabs are all about before the event via their Chrome extension or Developer SDK

The is the 2nd in a series of sharing stories across the start-up space and the seasoned product manager perspective. Startups usually don’t have a product manager as the founders take on that responsibility – although eventually they’ll need a product manager.

Join us for this session, and if you’re a start-up & interested in having your company featured, please get in touch with Liz & Jen. We plan to get a 3rd product management at startups session in this year.

Xero will be our fabulous hosts for the evening so RSVP now!

March wrap: Enhance your communication skills with sketching

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This month, Rebecca Jackson, sketchnoter extraordinaire helped us communicate more visually and Brainmates very kindly sponsored the evening!

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? The premise was that if we learn to draw what we are hearing rather than writing a long diatribe of words, not only will we remember better what we heard, we will have an easier reference tool to explain and share what we have learnt with others.

Rebecca focused on the sketchnote approach as a discipline one can practise to get better at forming ideas into visual memes and thus expanding our skills to prepare us to use this in any forum. What often limits people is their notion of “I cannot draw” and thus revert back to words and traditional formats. What sketchnoting showed us, first of all, you can use alot of words and still be sketching! This example has NO drawings at all 🙂

Then Rebecca showed us how we can practice (without too much social ridicule) to allow us to build confidence to use drawing and sketching publicly.

The second thing to consider with sketchnoting, although we didn’t get to talk about this as much due to time, was what it offered as a presentation tool itself. Instead of preparing a powerpoint with lots of bullet points and words, a sketchnote could be used to be the communication tool. The power of the sketchnote for this purpose is you are still needed to provide a verbal presentation – which is often forgotten in presentations these days – but you have a much better cue card for yourself to do the talking!

The structure of the session did give us a bit of an overview of why it can be valuable to use visual tools to remember things, and once upon time was a fundamental approach to memory retention before we could quickly look it up on the internet or rely on presentation notes. Rebecca had us try using two Ted talks – this allowed us to give it a go and appreciate how “hard” it is and then have another go and notice it already gets a bit easier the second time around.

A couple of comments from the group after their first effort – was it seemed hard and “the speaker was talking too fast” – which might be easy to interpret as bad choice of video. However, in having to draw to take notes, the brain was definitely being challenged to do something new while listening at the same time. It is important to remember that riding a bike the first time isn’t easy, and practice really is important to build a habit.

My personal observation was that even by the second attempt, it was easier to listen and sketch. And I certainly observed that I retained more information from the two talks than I would have if I had just sat there and listened or wrote my usual scrappy style. Lastly, I have an immediate visual tool to share what I learnt from those sessions than I would if I had just taken notes. The memory jogger style of the sketchnote is something I had not appreciated until I had tried it

Try it yourself with Rebecca’s presentation below and the links to the TED talks we used then take a pix & tweet it out to us!

How do *you* manage products?

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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.

RB_Master_Pos_RGB (1)

 

February wrap: Product Managers are from Pluto* and UXers are from Uranus

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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.

A fabulous panel of UX and Product Manager pairs spoke about how they work together collaboratively at their organisations. A lot of common themes came out of the talks, but also the individual styles and cultures of each of the companies presenting showed how important the set up can be to the individual experience.

This event could not have happened without the fabulous support of the product management team from Aconex and the lovely facilitation by Kirsten Mann (Director Customer Experience / UX and Online Support) to keep our speakers to time and inject wiseness and humour at the appropriate moments!

*The ‘object’ formerly known as the Planet

Our panel was made up of:

Aconex / Mark + David

David and Mark kicked off the panel and used a few props to get their point across. David mentioned that he had once heard a great quote from Peter Merholz that stated “good UX is indistinguishable from excellent product mgmt”. That certainly brought some questions to mind as to what the reason is for defining and separating the roles, so David and Mark proceeded to use their hoola hoops to show us the differences (and the intention was to show the overlaps but the window space didn’t support that!)

image1

Mark called out a whole bunch of tasks that are usually sitting in the PM circle – product strategy, market fit, competitor analysis and we can go on… and David listed out traditional UX tasks such as design, customer journey maps and more. Then the guys proceeded to swap their tasks from one circle to the other – because for them it sometimes just depends on time and need as to who does it. Not title or law.

Mark pointed out that since joining Aconex and getting the opportunity to work with David he has been really pleased to find he doesn’t need to do so-called UX tasks anymore. He had previously done them, as he didn’t really have someone else who did. So now he is really enjoying not having to do it and being able to rely on such fabulous quality work that David produces.

SEEK / Nicole + Vedran

Nicole and Vedran organised their thoughts into four key ares:

  1. Involve the UX-er early
  2. Always start with the user journey
  3. User testing is not just the UX-ers responsibility
  4. Product managers can design too (queue audience laughter for this one!)

image5

Nicole shared with us that the Seek had only recently (1-2 years ago) begun to adjust their approach to include UX more closely in their product design and process. Seek had for a very long time been a strategic driven organisation and as a result saw the UX and design part as an later part of product design. Once the UX was being involved in the conversation early, including the strategy discussions, product have found it is a much easier and quicker ideation process because everyone understands the direction. Now it is just debating the nuances of button design (radio is best!) rather than the product purpose.

The call out about getting more of the team who will build the product involved in the user testing was well received by the audience. Perhaps in the opposite twist of the above observations, a lot can be lost in translation. If the UX-er is the only person who can provide a perspective on the customer need a lot of internal debate persists about what the customer problem is, instead of an argument about how best to solve the problem. The latter type of discussion obviously being a much preferred outcome as everyone is now contributing to the best product rather than which is opinion is more valuable.

Vedran spoke to the last point about product managers being able to design – i don’t know who was laughing more out of the audience, PM or UX – but Vedran’s point was that everyone should be able to contribute to the design process. It should not necessarily remain only the domain of the UX team/person as anyone can throw in a light bulb moment to the problem. If the first three steps have all been followed then the whole team is engaged, empathising and understanding the problem and thus all can contribute.

MYOB / Russell + Scott

The guys from MYOB took things in a slightly different direction from our first two speakers – they rejected the premise that UX-ers and PM’s are not getting along. They also shared a lot of space metaphors…..

The context Russell provided was that MYOB has been around a long time and enjoys considerable success with a significant market share. Disruptive competition has certainly challenged that position but that has brought about some positive changes, whereby UX and product were merged into the same teams. This has brought a lot of benefits to the relationships and the team dynamics because everyone is now set with the same objectives. It is perhaps other teams that they don’t play so well with now…!!

image6

A common approach helps everyone remain pragmatic and everyone spends a lot of time with customers. There is very clear focus on ensuring plenty of lead time is provided to design before going to the engineers. There is nothing worse than setting up a team with design and engineering at the same time and then having engineering wait for UX. It puts too much pressure on that side, and leave engineers equally in a frustrating position.

They do have some situations that don’t work, despite things currently humming along well. When an individual comes in and wants to be a control freak or a rock star that isn’t so helpful. The other side of it that Scott pointed out was that sometimes the designer has to remember to let go of the gold plated version!

REA / Chris + Ricky

Last, but certainly by no means least Chris and Ricky talked us through their approach. They also had a little bit of a scene to set – as REA had been, for a time, always arranging staff into project teams for product development. This lead to very project focussed objectives that resulted in poor cohesion between projects, and accumulation of both tech and design debt. Chris described himself as the “crusher of dreams” as at times he just had to say no to good design as the project deadlines loomed.

image7

Ricky shared this frustration at times needing to “talk up to the PM” to be able to get an idea across the line, as they were making the calls and their delivery pressures were creating tension between good design outcomes and budget/timelines. The intention had not been to create an informal hierarchy but it creeped in as a result of the environment.

REA realised they needed to change from this model and adjusted the teams accordingly. Both Ricky and Chris described how they then run specific cross-team sessions to keep abreast of what designers or product managers, respectively, are doing in other areas of the business. In terms of design this is particularly important to set out a UI toolkit /style guide to ensure end users do not get a clunky experience just because different teams are working asynchronously on the product.

Unfortunately, our 4th company, 99designs, were unable to make the session but have made their slide deck available. We hope to have Susan Teschner (product) & Catherine Hills (ux) at another Product Anonymous in the future.

Question time

We threw to the audience for questions – and there were a lot.

However, perhaps this is all best summed up by Rebecca Jackson – sketchnoting the evening (& see her blog post on the evening).  

If you wish to learn from her on how to enhance how you communicate via sketching then come check out the next Product Anonymous session (Mar 19th is the next one) & follow us on Twitter @product_anon or any of the other social networks we live in.

Enhance your communication skills with sketching

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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

RSVP!

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).

Breaking into Product Managment – General Assembly panel

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Last week, General Assembly hosted a panel session on Breaking into Product Management for those interested in becoming a product manager or wondering how to get their 1st product manager job.

The panel included myself Liz Blink, Adam Fry from Sportsbet, Laura Cardinal from Xero and Brad Dunn from Nazori with Julien Viard from Rowben Consulting facilitating the discussion.

How to get started in Product Management

A theme that ran through each of the panelists’ presentations, was how they got started in the field, a taste of what the job is like and advice for those in the audience.

Laura Cardinal / Xero

Laura kicked off with her story – that she had been doing product management before she had her first job with those words in the title. She was working in customer service, and still dreaming of becoming a famous rock star, when she first was struck by a frustration at a problem that could be solved better, but had no idea how to go about implementing that idea.

Intro_PM_Master.001

Laura was working at a water company where plumbers would come in each day, on their way to their jobs to pay for and collect a print out of the house pipes for the job they were doing. Every day she’d listen to plumbers grumbling about the amount of time this took up, and in turn, she’d listen to the customer service reps grumble about the plumbers choice of deodorant – or lack there of.

The light bulb went off and what if they created a website where plumbers could access, download and print their own plans. With the amount of money that would save the business on printing paper and customer service, they wouldn’t even have to charge for it. At the time, Laura knew nothing about development, but surely that it could be done.

Laura talked to everybody that she could, would share her idea and solution with anyone who would listen and eventually she got the buy in she needed to implement her idea. All that talking and sharing and testing helped work through the refinement and iteration of the idea, and so they built the product. Laura had done enough convincing and managed to build a team around her to develop and launch what was called ‘Plumbers on-line’ and it still exists today… well a complete reincarnation of it anyway……

Her advice to those in the room who wanted to be in this space was to “fill your own scorecard with the skills you need” so that when you go for a product management role you already have everything you need to step into the role – without needing the title to sit on your resume.

Brad Dunn / Nazori

Brad drew our attention to the Apple retail experience and used that to highlight how paying attention to the right kind of data will really help you in a product management career.

His focus was very much on asking questions & using data until you really know why people do what they do. The Apple retail experience is one that very much contributes to the success of the product and is very precise. Nothing is done by accident in its layout including the angle the phones are rested on the bench.

The man behind this design, Ron Johnson, pioneered the concepts behind the store and came up with the Genius Bar. After Apple, he repeated his success and helped Target become “hip”.

However, this was not necessarily an easily repeatable approach because the exact opposite outcome occurred when he transformed JC Penney. Their stock price rose upon the announcement of his joining the company but the approach was the wrong one for JC Penney, the makeover did not work, the stock price plunged and he was fired.

Brad put this down to fundamental “attribution error” whereby one assumes that one internal element will determine the outcome & ignores that many other factors contribute to an outcome. In this instance, Ron Johnson helped Apple succeed with his retail store concept but there were other factors contributing to his success.

How do you avoid falling into the same trap & getting caught by this bias? Brad provided some guidance and suggestions. He suggested usability tools such as Usability Hub to get your designs and screens tested, get some A/B testing into your work, and he liked mixpanel over Google Analytics, especially the funnel component. Brad also had some favourite books to call out – he LOVES Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup and he said he lends the book Ten Faces of Innovation, by IDEO co-founder Tom Kelley, to clients before they start on projects together (& the clients rave about it).

Liz Blink / Sensis & Product Anonymous

Like Laura, I have also followed a rather unobvious path to being a product manager and was surely one before I stepped into a job with that title. I think product management is very much a mindset.

Having started out my life as a scientist I often get the question of “well how the heck did you get to this then” :-). The mindsets and the skillsets are so resusable – the curiosity that wants to get to the bottom of every problem, the need to know why, why, why, and the testing of a hypothesis to determine if that theory is true could describe either profession.

I talked a little about what you want to look for when looking for a product manager job- complete with a Venn diagram – it isn’t really a product management talk without one!

venn diagram

I was interested in what an individual might want to seek out for themselves as they choose a company to work for. Depending on the stage they are at, it might be looking for good support, mentoring and an opportunity to work at a company where you can eventually move into that role from within the company. This will give you a great opportunity to prove you have the mindset – something that is harder to prove than we might like to admit!

One circle in this Venn is to check where the company is at in its maturity of leading product managers, where do you sit in the organisation, who do you report to, what department are you in?

The other circle is what can you bring to the team? Do you have lots of technical skill but need to build up your people skills, your influence skills, your customer interview skills?

Every time you take a step, you want to understand what you need to bring to the team to ensure success, but also what you can learn from your team so you are developing your skill sheet further.

My last thought for my 5 minutes was really that as a product manager you are a little schizophrenic – you have to be empathic and constantly in tune with your customers and yet you will need to make tough, hard ass decisions – and you will have to make those calls as no one else will. I borrowed my quote from William Hsu – the constant balance between the fuzzy people stuff and the precise tech stuff. It’s a blast!

Adam Fry / Sportsbet

Last, but certainly not least, the polished Mr. Fry wrapped it all up beautifully for us with some fabulous pearls of wisdom.

Adam said that while he has been doing product management for awhile now, not a single one of those jobs has been the same so he talked a little about how a product manager should act.

If you mimic the process you won’t find yourself very successful nor it a very satisfying career! The core of the role stays the same though – you are the expert, the evangelist and a super sleuth. It is a little like being part of the United Nations – no authority & always the mediator. You are constantly challenged in everything you do, as someone always has an opinion and idea so you need to be ready to explain, defend and back yourself and your product decisions.

Sometimes you have to let people (including customers) down. When a feature hasn’t made it, part of your role is deciding who to tell & then to break the news to that stakeholder! Not an easy one – although when you get to announce great news/features/new products are coming it makes up for the bad news days…!

Thanks!

After the session, there were some great questions from the audience and a great set of conversations happening. Thanks to General Assembly for running the session and check out their course staring in February, where the one of your speakers, Adam Fry will be an instructor.

If you are looking to get into product management, come check out a Product Anonymous session (Feb 19th is the next one) & follow us on Twitter @product_anon or any of the other social networks we live in.

 

Breaking into Product Management session with General Assembly

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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

RSVP now

Product Managers & UX-ers: Working Well Together

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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

RSVP now