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.
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.
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
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.
For our March session of Product Anonymous, we were fortunate to be joined by Amir Ansari, Global Head of Product Design at Iress, to share some of his experiences with raising design maturity and capability in his organisations, and it may not be how you would initially think.
Appreciation of Product Design
Over recent years, many more companies have started to appreciate the value of product and design. And as an industry, we’ve seen a bit of an explosion in growth. Many companies have bolstered their design teams, and transformed the way they work.
Atlassian grew 1600% or 16x in 4 years (6 to 106 designers)
Coles grew 550% or 5.5x in 1 year (10 to 65 designers)
But how many designers are enough?
Is it even about the number of designers? Or more about the ratio of designers to developers?
So what’s the best path for designing and building better products? Is it to hire a bunch more designers, and get the ratio down? Some implications of this approach may be your increase in overhead, and the need to change your operating model, which is not necessarily a terrible thing. However, surely there’s a more scalable way to grow.
In fact, according to a Nielsen Norman Group article, the typical ratio alone does not ensure greater organisational impact, better designs, or more usable products.
The Challenge – How might we Improve Design Maturity…
When we talk about Design Maturity, we’re talking about:
Product Design
Innovation
Human Centred Design
User Experience
UI design
Visual Design
Service Design
Back to that designer to developer ratio. For Iress, the ratio is 1:35. Or 1 designer working across 5 squads. That’s 14 design practitioners, grown over 20 years, covering 120 products. When it comes to design, Iress still falls short of a minimum acceptable amount of practitioners.
An assessment against NNgroup’s stages of UX maturity would be between 1 and 2, with obvious aspiration to move towards a 6.
So therein lies the challenge – how might we improve the design maturity, without unrealistically increasing UX headcount.
Guiding Principles
As the old adage goes, If you give somebody a fish, you feed them for a day. But if you teach somebody to fish, you feed them for a lifetime.
The same goes for design – to increase design maturity, don’t just rush to increase design headcount.
Over the past 15 years, one of Amir’s fundamental principles has been to democratise the craft of design – to teach and empower everybody within the organisation to practise design, from customer research, to experimentation, validation and much more.
Ensure everybody has the confidence and is empowered to talk about design. Talk about the product. Talk about the customer. Talk about the end user.
Designers are facilitators of the design process. Not owners of the design.
Everybody else in the room, from Business Analysts, Quality Assurance, Engineers, Product Owner and Product Managers all have a perspective and opinions too. Use the right toolkits to validate those opinions.
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”
Maya Angelou – American Philosopher
Nobody can be an expert straight away. Mastery comes with practice. So continue to practise and build that muscle.
Don’t start by putting slide decks together to pitch for why design should be more valued, or why you hire more designers. Rather, get out there with the clients, and start doing design work, and showing value. Use that newly created value as the enticement to invest more in design.
Strategies
Educate, coach, train anyone who shows interest, and promote DIY.
When Amir first started at Iress, there were only 6 designers to support 700 engineers. Way too many to try to teach every single engineer about design practices. So one of the first things they did was to document their playbook, starting with some of their most common human-centred design activities that were relevant to Iress. And without jargon, so that non-designers could understand and follow too.
A typical Playbook Topic skeleton could include:
What is it?
Why should you do it?
When should you do it?
How to do it?
Resources and templates
Skill level required
Typical duration
This way Business Analysts, Product Managers and others could read the content, reach out for guidance, and give the activity a go.
Following the activity, the design team would debrief them – how did it go? What worked, what didn’t? Try this next time. Essentially, helping team members add another tool to their toolkit.
The design team also tracks the playbook engagement. Who is visiting, and from which disciplines? Which topics are being used? Are some topics being neglected? Do they need to run campaigns or refreshers to get people to re-engage?
Create champions
It’s important to reduce the friction for non-designers to get involved, learn and talk about the design craft. At Iress, they introduced communities, and have created over 25 design-specific slack channels, some around design-related themes (eg, the Iress Design System), others based on region (eg, for Melbourne Product Design Team, or the UX Research Enthusiasts UK channels).
Also, after running design activities, Amir’s team gathers feedback and measures the sentiment of non-designer participants about the process. Was it valuable? Could something be done better? Would you come again? Build interest and iterate the process so that people want to return.
Bake into existing processes
When you’re trying to change the way people work, there is always going to be resistance. Everybody is already overworked. Reduce the barriers. Break up the processes and the craft, and insert smaller portions into existing processes.
Product design principles – agreed and followed
The Design Team (or one of their principals) created a design charter, or a set of principles, that the team could easily and quickly refer to, so regardless of where they were in the design or build cycle, they could check that they were on track. Have they removed their biases? Did they understand what success would look like? And can it be measured?
Make it a team sport
Design is a team sport. We all work for product companies. We are all responsible for delivering value to the customer through the products we build.
Create demand in product design and UX.
Show value from the UX craft, so that more people want to join in and share the same
Beware, some of the Traps
The Dunning Kruger Effect
After you’ve coached somebody, and they’ve read a bit of material from your playbook, and even run an activity, there’s a danger that they overestimate their ability. There is a chance that they start to erode the craft of design.
Constant education and reinforcement is required.
Did you know you only need 5 users for meaningful research? But did you also know you should have asked the user this, and you should do that.
Did you know if you run a design sprint, you need to prepare x, y and z?
If you build it they will come
You cannot assume that just because you’ve taught a group of people once, that they will continue. Everybody has their own work to do, and their own agendas. Again, constant education and reinforcement.
Thank you
Thank you so much to Amir for sharing his insights; our volunteers – Gwen, Nosh, Sakthee and Steve; and our event host – SEEK.
Further reading and resources
Some resources mentioned during the session include:
In today’s competitive world, companies are always looking for a way to stand out against their competitors. In the past they may have achieved this through features or advertising. More recently organisations have started to differentiate themselves by rethinking the whole customer journey and delivering an amazing experience around all aspects of the product.
We call this “Product-led.” This doesn’t mean that it is “product manager led,” it means that the whole organisation and product is oriented around customer and business success.
Amy Johnson from Propel Ventures led us through 5 steps to bring Product-led thinking into your organisation
What is Product-led?
Product-Led is “a relentless focus on customer value to create products that sustainably drive growth”
When we dig into this a bit more, Product-led is about focus on the value the product creates for your customers and your business. For example this could be in the product pricing, Go To Market activities, or design. This involves having a clear vision and an empowered team to deliver against the vision
Why does Product-led matter?
Product-led is more beneficial to a business as it has a long term growth in mind, as well as minimising waste. Conversely, Sales-led often means only focussing on the next sale, so is not sustainable in the long term. Technology-led means building cool products based on the enabling technology, but risks creating products that don’t solve any problems.
This article will drill into the the 5 core tasks necessary to move to Product-led
Product Vision
Product Strategy
Shared Success Measures
Organise around value
Outcome based roadmaps
Let’s dive into each one
Product Vision
A good vision provides clarity on the future, so you know where you are going. This clarity is important because going fast in the wrong direction won’t get you to success.
But you won’t be able to create one by yourself. Vision creation should take in diverse perspectives and different voices to make sure it is clear. Use these voices to focus on the change you want the product to make in the world. You need to find a vision that will inspire the team.
You’ll know when you have a good vision when it is easily internalised by the whole team.
Product Strategy
Product strategy is about mapping out the path to get the product vision. This requires understanding the strategic intent, the challenges and the business goals. Use this knowledge to then clearly articulate the goals, which are prioritised based on strategic intent.
There is a risk in skipping this thinking if you join an organisation. You may inherit everything that is already going on. While it is possible to artificially create a bottom-up strategy by reviewing the backlog and package it into themes, there is a risk that it does not achieve business goals. It is important to make sure your strategy is aligned with the product vision above.
Focus is a key part of delivering against the strategy and vision, so clearly articulate the goals and ensure all activities are targeted towards business goals
Shared Success Measures
Having clear success metrics that are shared helps the organisation achieve alignment, by describing what “good looks like.” It is important that these are legitimate measures of success based on customer value, rather than metrics that might be easy to measure but won’t help you know more if you are on track – known as “vanity metrics.”
Ideally these success measure should be outcomes, not outputs. Outcomes are what the business needs to achieve, whereas an output is a delivery that contribute towards achieving that outcome. For example, the customer cares about how you have saved their time and money, rather than whether you released a feature or not.
To create these success measures, you’ll need to know what is valuable to the customer, as well as a way to measure it. Finding a way to know what good looks like in the product can ensure you are tracking towards a common idea of success.
Organise around value
There is a risk in organisational design that you create teams around what the company values rather than what the customer values. This is known as Conway’s Law – where complicated products end up looking like the organisational structure.
To ensure the customer gets the most value out of the product, the company should be organised around the customer’s perception of value with the product. Create a journey map to understand the customer experience, pain points, opportunities and make sure the end-to-end experience works. From there you can define the problem to solve and the metrics of success. Once you have these you can experiment and iterate.
Outcome based roadmaps
Once you know where you are going, how you are going to get there, metrics to measure customer outcomes, and what the customer values, then you need to ensure that delivery stays on target.
An ‘outcome-based roadmap’ takes what is known about how the customer or business measures success, and gives context to every item on the roadmap. It articulate goals and what you are trying to achieve. It also reiterates the product strategy and makes sure that unnecessary items don’t appear on the roadmap.
This makes the roadmap a communication tool, not a project plan. One way to enforce this thinking is to use the now : next : later format. This is a more realistic view given that development is not always predictable, and it allows flexibility to change based on customer feedback
Summary
Product-led is the way to focus the organisation on success; through identifying customer value and sustainable business growth.
There are 5 key areas that need to be consider to successfully make the transition:
Product Vision – A phrase that describes the future to align and inspire the organisation
Product Strategy – This maps out the focused path towards the vision
Shared Success Measures – Aligns the organisation and tell you if the strategy is working
Organise around Value – Ensure that you are aligned to clear customer value
Outcome Based Roadmap – Ensure that delivery stays on target
About our speaker
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.
Thank you
Thanks to our wonderful friends at Everest Engineering who hosted the event.
And here’s a bit of behind the scenes setup action via Bryce’s tweet
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.
When Aaron Hardy first moved into a product leader role at PageUp, he needed to take stock of the situation, and work out where to focus his efforts first. Were there changes to make to the product? Did they have an adequate strategy to guide them? Or should he begin with his team?
After speaking with his new team, one area Aaron identified as lacking was a capability framework or career ladder. How were the team to know how they were performing? What steps would they need to take to move to the next level?
The team had already been through multiple restructures, with various leaders coming and going. And with that, each time the team would inevitably end up having to explain what they did, what value they brought, and justify why they were needed on the team. Would he put them through that all again?
Taking inspiration from Ben Horowitz (and Jim Barksdale) Aaron decided to start with his people.
Step 1: Researching Capability Frameworks
Before jumping straight in to create his own capability map, Aaron researched the existing frameworks already available. And there were plenty out there. However, none of them quite fit what he was looking for.
Intercom’s framework has been shared quite extensively, and does a great job to show how to level up as a product manager. However, they have a very different business model, making it difficult to apply to PageUp.
The Association of Product Professionals had a good structure, demonstrating external (market) vs internal (operational) aspects. However, it was a little too heavy for what they needed. Aaron needed something simpler for his team to use.
Pragmatic Marketing Framework: Looking outside of direct product management, Pragmatic gives a good visual of broad capabilities. It also helps you evaluate what you’re doing and what you’re not. Then giving you the opportunity to assess if you think those gaps are important.
Aaron wanted to find something that was relevant to the way they did product. Something that his people could relate to, and use in their day to day activities.
Step 2: Product Mastery Levels
After having a good view of the different skills needed, the other side of a capability framework is how many levels you need. Where is your company at, and what’s right for them?
Also, it has become more common for companies to recognise and support different career tracks for:
individual contribution; and
people leadership.
Wherever you land, remember – it’s for a point in time. As you grow and mature, you may need to extend the framework in the future.
You should also consider the different types of product work, from:
Feature Work
Growth Work
Scaling Work
Product Market Fit Expansion.
And the different possible paths into product.
Beyond the obvious Product Owners or other product adjacent roles, some other sources to grow your talent pool could be from support, operations, consulting, marketing, psychology, research, entrepreneurs, and many more.
Step 3: Making it Bespoke
The next stage is to try to pull it all together:
Mapping out all the skills;
Removing the irrelevant ones;
Finding the duplicates; and
Ranking what is important.
Hot tip: Making things visual can make them easier to understand.
However, then comes the hard part:
Mapping to your own framework:
Writing descriptions for each capability. This will eventually be incorporated into Position Descriptions, so some things to consider would be:
What is expected at each mastery level?
How are the different mastery levels mapped to different roles?
How would people demonstrate their capability?
Socialising:
How does your capability matrix align with other disciplines you partner with (eg, UX)? It’s good to gather feedback and support from your peers, senior team members; partners and possibly even senior leaders.
Input from the team:
You can also include the team. Have them help with the descriptions and differentiators. Rank the importance of each capability. Get them involved so they can contribute and shape the result, making it easier to create buy-in.
Ways to Level Up
Once you have your shiny new capability framework, it can help provide clear guidance for the team of what’s needed to reach the next level and they can do one of many self-assessments available online.
But how can they actually level up?
There are plenty of methods are your disposal:
Formal training or courses – to either learn new skills, or revalidate existing skill levels;
Observation – following product leaders on social media;
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!”
