This month we will be talking about OKRs – aka Objectives & Key Results!

This is a follow on from our Roadmap discussion in February where some of the frustrations with roadmaps could potentially be addressed by working with OKRs.

OKR’s have been around awhile now, but are somewhat relatively new for product teams here in Oz. We have gathered a few folk who are actively using them, to share the pain and the success of getting started.

Our presenters will be:

• Andrew Knibbe, Head of Product – Direct Hirer at Seek – has over 10 years of product management experience – cutting his product teeth in the early days alongside the ThoughtWorks team at Sensis followed by stints at Carsales and Flippa before moving to SEEK where he has had Head of Product roles across both the Consumer and Business side of the employment marketplace. He doesn’t miss the chevrons-on-a-page days of product roadmaps and remains excited about what OKRs can mean for product teams (and customers!).
• Wayne Allan, Technical Product Manager, REA – A muso turned software engineer turned product manager, I love creating things people love! Currently solving problems at realestate.com.au
• Brad Dunn is the Co-founder and Product Director at OHNO in Melbourne. Before that, he was the executive for Product & Customer Experience at Geo. For 7 years, Brad was the CEO of Nazori, a mobile product development business, where they worked with clients in 12 countries around the world including Samsung, Airbnb and Aesop.

For some pre-reading to get you across the area if you haven’t heard of them or used them yourself then try these resources:

• https://www.oreilly.com/business/free/files/introduction-to-okrs.pdf
• https://www.range.co/blog/are-you-doing-okrs-right
• OKRs for product management (examples)
• How to combine OKRs & agile product management

Thanks to our sponsors Medibank for being our hosts this month. RSVP now.

We are Medibank – an integrated healthcare company providing private health insurance and health solutions to 3.7 million Australians through our Medibank and ahm brands, and complimentary health services.

We also provide a range of integrated healthcare services to our private health insurance policyholders, government, corporate and other retail customers. With over 3,000 employees, our head office is located in Melbourne, Victoria, with operations nationally throughout Australia.

By delivering on our promise, for Better Health for Better Lives, we work better as individuals, better as a team and better as a business.

A lot goes into creating a strategy – market data, competitor information, current performance evaluation, vision, mission, values and on and on.

The creator of Wardley Maps, Simon Wardley, argues we need a map, not a SWOT. Maps help us with situational awareness so we can see movement in the future and maps are important in deciding on actions.

Our speaker for the evening, Kim Ballestrin of elabor8, will run us through the concept of Wardley Mapping, how to use it for decision making and some examples of how others have used this type of mapping. The bulk of the evening will be workshop style as we will all create a Wardley map.

Hope to see you there. RSVP now!

Doors 6pm
Talk starts at 6:30pm

Our Speaker:

Kim Ballestrin is a passionate and highly skilled Principal Consultant at Elabor8 working on the Agile transformations of large enterprises.

She has over 20 years of diverse management (IT) experience, helping some of Australia’s most prominent organisations on their Agile change journey. Kim is an experienced technologist, having worked in roles from IT business analyst through to program and delivery centre management. She specialises in Lean, Cynefin, Agile, Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, DevOps and ideas to improve the ways that companies work and deliver value to customers.

Currently the organiser of the Melbourne Cynefin and Lean Coffee Meetups, Kim regularly presents and runs workshops at leading local and international conferences on the Cynefin Framework, Decision Mapping and Early Idea Feasibility.

Welcome to 2019!!!

For our 1st session of the year, we are focusing on the #1 requested topic in our annual survey – roadmaps!

Our speakers will be taking you through their perspective on roadmaps… we won’t give it all away just yet but you will hear that not every roadmap is f**ked, tips on how to unf**k your roadmap, and of course when to tell a roadmap to go f**k itself.

Our speakers will include examples from both personal experience and the way their current organisation navigates their use. Our three great speakers will be:

David Bignell

• Product Lead at SEEK, currently focused on improving the eCommerce space across the APAC region.
• Picked up most of my craft from stuffing things up at least once.
• Current ‘product passion’ would be trying to describe things in verbs and not nouns. Gives an interesting perspective!

Whitney Cali

• GM Product, Audience & Experience, REA Group
• As REA Group’s GM – Product, Audience & Experience, Whitney Cali is responsible for creating smart and compelling experiences in realestate.com.au’s desktop & mobile apps to help change the way the world experiences property. She leads a team of product managers, designers and UX researchers to create intuitive and personalised experiences that help individuals make great property decisions.

Keith Swann

• Lead Product Manager, Origin Energy

There will be lots of time for Q&A and you can submit questions via Sli.do or vote on the questions of others. Details will be shared on the night.

Thanks to our sponsors! Without them these events would not happen!

Thank you to Gather for hosting us. Gather is a brand within United Co. and exists to connect and inspire a community of Melbourne’s bright-minded and open-hearted, exploring complex questions, expanding perspectives and building skills for a thriving future.

Making sure we don’t go hungry or die of thirst..

RSVP now

September has us talking about humans. RSVP now.

This session will take a look at the range of experiences we have as individuals, and what we can draw from our own experiences to improve how we design and build for others.

We’ll look at how much we delve into that range, how much we shy away from the extremes, from our intuitions, and how we overlook the nuance in favour of the coarse and the safe.

We’ll go through some frameworks that help apply these conversations at work, how you can format insights that feed into design specifications, and we’ll discuss how these principles apply to facilitation and user research, product, and service design.

Why?
We know people are at the core of what we do, but we rarely explore them with as much rigour or subtlety as we do more technical domains. Our best developers, designers, and product managers are rarely able to talk about humans with as much confidence and nuance as they can talk about ruby, typefaces or commercial strategy.

It’s hard. Partly because the topic is so subjective – it’s so close to all of us, and it’s hard to lay claim to being an expert. It can also be confronting, we can lack the vocabulary, and it’s easy to be wrong. But what do we lose by holding back from fully exploring the human dimension of the problems we’re trying to solve? What tools can we use to make these conversations easier, and focused on product outcomes?

Our Speaker
Gin Atkins is the Head of Product at The Conversation, a global network of independent newsrooms across Africa, Europe, Asia-Pac and North America.

Gin has spent the last 15 years learning about, designing for, and leading people in both product and service environments. She draws on a diverse range of experiences, spanning youth work, community mental health, management consulting, enterprise innovation labs and tech startups.

This includes designing and delivering immersive experiences for hundreds of young people across Australia, working with adults with complex mental health needs, designing a global front-line leadership program for one of the worlds biggest mining companies, a B2B SaaS product focused around data insight into AWS, and go to market strategy for a hardware-software time tracking product.

Gin on Twitter

Join us for a panel discussion on Service Design & Product Management on June 21st. RSVP

Today’s customers demand more than a good product; they expect a great customer experience. Are we being experience led or product led? How do we come together to deliver both?

Most designers have felt the frustration of working on product led projects. Most product managers have felt the inevitable scope creep of designers. If you’ve felt the pain of the design vs product divide, you’re not alone. It’s time we sit down for a chat (& drinks) to work through…

We already have a waitlist for this event but spaces open up so put yourself on the list. Drinks and nibbles will be provided.

Our panelists:

Kate Edwards-Davis, Product Manager, Karista – a start-up helping people who need care to find their ideal community-based care or disability support service.

She stumbled into a career in IT after studying philosophy and classical music performance. Always a strong advocate for the value of spending time listening to customers, it has helped her teams to deliver imaginative and valuable solutions in many sectors including finance, retail, manufacturing, government and education. She should probably say her greatest joy in life is her two young sons – but in all honesty they probably come second to her obsession with the music of Prince.

Daniel Kinal, Senior Product Manager, MYOB

Daniel has been in product management for over 15 years, chiefly working in IT with a focus on B2B products. He gets excited about helping businesses become more effective in decision-making, more efficient in their processes and more engaging 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. He’s passionate about product management as a discipline and is intrigued by how businesses, large and small, grapple with the sometimes-elusive concepts of innovation and collaboration.

Our wonderful Service design line-up:

We will use sli.do for panel questions so start prepping your thoughts on what is the difference between service & product? I’ll add more controversial questions closer to the date 🙂

The event will be hosted by SuperSeed / NEXT – The innovation division of the Reece Group.

Leading the Product (LTP) are planning another round of Lightning Talks this year. Would you like to be one of those speakers & have the chance to present to 500+ product professionals???

We’re hosting a LTP Pitchfest to give you the chance to do exactly that!

First, we’ll hear from the folks who did Lightning Talks last year. Get their tips and hear about their experience in planning, practicing and getting up there!

Then, it’s your turn! Those of you interested will get 90 seconds to pitch what you’d like to talk about. No slides… just you sharing with the crowd & judges.

At the end of the evening, 2 people will be selected to present a Lightning Talk at Leading the Product 2018. Selection is based on the judges’ vote and votes from the audience.

At the Sydney pitchfest, Ivy Horinbrook made it thru the pitches & will be giving a talk at LTP. She said:
When I first read about pitch night, I thought “no way”. 30 pitches, one winner… sounds a little too much like gladiatorial combat. But then I thought, it’s 90 seconds, what do I have to lose? And on the night the crowd was friendly, there was a sense of camaraderie between those pitching, and it was fun to engage the crowd. I still can’t believe I won – I’ll be taking the stage in front of 400 product managers in Sydney in October, that’s a pretty amazing opportunity.

Our judges for the evening:

• Sarah Mitchell – Product Manager for Leading the Product
• Adrienne Tan – Co-Founder of Brainmates & Leading the Product
• Nicole Brolan – Product Director at SEEK
• Senior Product Leader from Culture Amp soon to be announced.

I WANT TO PRESENT! WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?

You should rsvp for this session and then tell us you’re interested via this form.

WHAT IS A LIGHTNING TALK?

It is a five minute presentation, with 20 slides that advance automatically. You can see the video of the three Lightning talks from Leading the Product Melbourne

Of course don’t forget to get your tickets for the Leading the Product 2018 as it is going to be a fabulous product event!

Thanks to our LTP sponsors Brainmates and Seek for making this event happen.

RSVP now and help us pick the line-up for LTP