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.

Level Up with a Bespoke Product Management Capability Framework – Feb 2023 Wrap

Photo courtesy of Yau Min

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.

"We take care of people, the products, and the profits - in that order" Ben Horowitz.

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.

Many different frameworks, from Pragmatic Marketing, Intercom, Ravi Mehta, the Association of Product Professionals, and more.

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.

Individual contributor career track:
Associate PM > PM > Senior PM > Principal PM

People Leadership career track:
Senior PM > Group PM, VP of Product

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.

Excel sheet with multiple crying emojis.
Cleaner visual representation of frameworks with colour coded sticky notes.

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;
  • Informal / on the job training;
  • Coaching and mentoring; and
  • Meetup groups.

Thank you

Thank you to Aaron for sharing his journey; our volunteers on the night, Yau, Yasha, Sakthee and Steve; and our event hosts Propel Ventures.

Slides and Additional Resources

Frameworks

Assessment tools

Additional reading

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!”

What’s all this hiring hullabaloo? And interviewing stress? A panel AMA event

If you are looking to change jobs or looking to hire, right now is an interesting time! We’ve been hearing ‘product is in demand’, there’s an impact on salaries and OMG! It’s the ‘great resignation’.

But what is really happening out there? We have a panel of folks in the thick of it to help understand what’s really happening.

Join us to hear what’s really affecting how they hire, what’s the same and what is changing and ask your questions! This is an Ask Me Anything (AMA) format. This is for both folks looking to hire and those looking for work or ‘open to opportunities’. We’ll be using slido for questions (#hiring) and it will be a hybrid session – so folk are welcome at our host location and online. RSVP now.

Our Speakers

Megan McDonald, Head of Product & Experience Design at World Vision Australia.

Megan has been working in Product roles for over 15 years, and over this time has experienced first-hand the exciting transformation of the role of product in organisations. She’s very ashamed to admit that in her early days as a fin services Product Manager she built products that were designed to extract revenue by limiting customer value .. yep, on purpose! But, in the years that followed, she’s also super proud to have been involved in the evolution of product into the truly human-centred practice it is now. 

Megan is a passionate believer in the value that good Product Management can deliver to organisations and their customers, and is busy putting “my money where my mouth is” as a council member of the Association of Product Professionals, working hard to advance the product profession. 

Day to day, Megan leads the Product & Experience Design function at World Vision Australia, and an amazing team focused on delivering Australia’s favourite charity experience. “I feel so lucky in this role because I get to solve real customer problems by building sh*t that works, all in the service of eliminating global poverty. And at the same time, I’m helping to create the next generation of product and design thinkers and practitioners.”

Georgia Hart, General Manager, Middleton Executive

Georgia moved to Melbourne roughly 5 years ago with just $200 in her pocket after spending her travelling budget way too soon (oops!). She found myself back in recruitment, learning the Australian landscape and quickly found that there are a lot of very cool start-ups and companies creating a big impact in the world. Georgia had traditionally always recruited Engineers with a little bit of Delivery & Product on the side but wanted more of it so joined Middleton Executive. Middleton Executive is a talent partner of choice for some of Australia’s most eminent tech and product companies and was founded to connect people in the product space. She’s had the pleasure of working with some awesome brands such as SEEK, Whispir, Papercut and is learning from some of the best product leaders in Australia. Big shout out to them for teaching her so much! 

In her own words “There’s no denying that the last 2 years have been a rollercoaster. In March, all my clients stopped hiring, people were losing their jobs, it was sheer panic. I found myself out of a sales role and in more of a position to support people navigate through the unknown. 2 years on and here we are, in the busiest market I’ve ever found myself in and having to learn new skills to attract the most in demand talent.”

Shiyu Zhu, Group Product Manager, Zendesk

Shiyu is an experienced Product Manager with 5+ years of experience in building product roadmaps and shipping features in an agile environment. She is problem-driven and likes to take a customer centric approach in every product feature to make sure it has an impact and solves for a real customer problem. Currently hiring at Zendesk, Shiyu has some key learnings about how the organisation has had to make adjustments in their approach in the current climate.

Our Host
Intelligence Bank

IntelligenceBank is the leading innovator in digital assets management and marketing operations.  The company helps marketing teams seamlessly manage digital assets, creative content approvals, marketing compliance, and creative project management to ensure brands get to market quickly, stay on brand and ensure regulatory compliance. IntelligenceBank’s beautifully designed platform is used by over 400 brands with 500,000+ users in 55 countries. IntelligenceBank has offices in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Follow them on LinkedIn

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After Research: Creating Useful & Well-Executed Research Outcomes

So you’ve completed your customer interviews – but now what?

How do you make sure that you’re creating the right insights based on all of your data? How do you advocate for your findings across product development, especially when they conflict with business objectives?

In this presentation, Jess will share how to set yourself up for success in the most important part of the user research journey – After Research. Learn how to effectively synthesise your qualitative data, create reusable and actionable insights & advocate your research across your team.

RSVP Thursday February 24, 2022

Our Speaker:

Jess Nichols

Jess Nichols – Principal, Research & Insights, Pluralsight
Jess is a research leader at Pluralsight (formerly A Cloud Guru), where she helps teach the world to cloud. She has spent the past decade focusing on discovering actionable insights through qualitative research approaches to ensure customer centricity across the product journey. Throughout her career she has worked globally, including several years based in San Francisco, working for companies such as Twitter, Uber and Deloitte.

Our Host:

TBD – we’re working out if this will be via zoom, in person or hybrid

End of Year product mega meetup!

Come and join the Australian Product Management community for a massive social and informative event as we discuss some ideas about what it means to be “Product-Led”.

This years Product Party unites the communities of Product Talks, Product Women, Product Mavens, Product Book Club and Product Anonymous – this is the one meetup to join them all!

Details and RSVP info here. Thursday December 2nd

What is the theme?
The topic for our special guest speakers to address will be:
“Can you have Product Led Growth without a Product Led Culture?”

In addition to the hosted speakers and Q&A opportunities there will be fun networking events and giveaways.

Where is the Event?
The Product Party will be an online event via Zoom so we can bring together several cities.
You must pre-register with the zoom link provided once you RSVP to access the event.

Event Sponsor – Amplitude.com
This year’s Product Party is proudly sponsored by Amplitude. Amplitude is a product analytics platform that helps businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform uses behavioural reports to understand users’ interactions with products and provides insights to accelerate work on a real-time basis.
Website: https://amplitude.com/

November Short Talks

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

What to do when someone mentions PLG (product led growth)

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.