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Hello From the Other Side – Ana Rowe

Product Managers often say the C level just doesn’t understand – so what does it look like when you reach that level and the tables are turned? What does the C level want to see from product? Ana moved from Product to COO and gave us this low down.

While PMs often feel misunderstood and a disagreement on a roadmap can sometimes feel like a personal attack, Ana says we need to remember an executive is constantly trying to balance short term survival with long term growth. Do we grow? Where do we invest? Where do we cut? Do we do this thing now? – are some of the questions going through their minds.

How you can help is to have a product strategy which has the that balance & shows you understand both short and long term goals. And of course your outcomes need to be aligned to the business goals. Those short term wins are what fund the long term strategy.

You need to have both clarity & confidence when it comes to research – both in understanding why it’s needed and what the results show.. Don’t just provide a report or data. Make sure you’re clear why are you dong the research, what opportunities you are unlocking, what are the risks are you’re trying to in/validate. Frame your research as minimising risk and driving growth.

People at the exec level are thinking at a different levels than product – they need to be thinking about budgets, talking to investors & analysts. They want to make sure the vision is being executed – but they do not need to be in the weeds for this. As the PM, you’ve been hired to be in the weeds. You have the detail but need to translate it to ‘why now’ instead of your usual ‘how’ thinking. As a PM, make sure you transfer the product strategy into business impact. Communicate why from the lens of customers, the market, sales, ROI, this the most important thing we should be doing. Knowing the entire business is helpful with this (be interested in financials, talk to other departments).

Product managers often joke that execs come up with pet projects and “dumb ideas”. You know the conversation – when someone has read a blog post or heard about something another company is doing or just had a shower idea that you think is ‘dumb’.

If this happens, ask yourself – if my strategy is strong why are they coming up with something new? Use those ‘dumb idea’ conversations as a SIGNAL. Consider this as a symptom of a shift, or something going wrong – especially when YOU think there’s already a good roadmap

Is there a low confidence in the current strategy, or your roadmap simply didn’t hit the mark? Or maybe they have some information you haven’t received yet, like a market shift for example. It’s your chance to shine. Use the exchange to understand where they are coming from and lean into your problem discovery skills. See if your current strategy already addresses it, and if you can accommodate testing and validating the idea. It’s a great opportunity to strengthen the relationship with your exec.

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Top (2025) Lessons – Roanna Gunaratnam

PMs have to keep learning and sometimes you need to re-learn.

Roana reflected on the ‘invisible work’ which defines a veteran PM’s career. Success in our field is often silent because if you are doing well at your job, everything looks effortless, chaos is kept at bay and all goes well. For example, who really sees the effort that goes into having that roadmap? Who sees all the conversations and market research? The internal conversations & alignment? The stressing over how to put together a good workshop?

So then, how do you measure your success and growth?

Consider:

• Ditch the vanity metrics. Just like we do with products, don’t measure your value with vanity metrics like how many slack emojis your post got. Measure it by whether the team is moving faster and if customers are ‘less unhappy’
• Lean into your spectrum. Product management is not just one role but a whole spectrum of activities such as strategy, technical depth or SME knowledge.
• Let go. You can’t and should not control everything. You need to let the team make a mistake and recover from it. (queue the song from Frozen)

When you have that imposter syndrome (which we all do…) because someone else has better tech understanding or someone makes amazing decks or someone else has tons of domain knowledge when you’re new – lean into your super powers. Learn what your strengths. Ro talked about realising she enjoys and is good at strategy and having clarity when under pressure. Leaning into those skills made her job more enjoyable.

As a product person, you have to lean into leadership no matter what and one of her re-leaned lessons was stepping back and letting the team make a mistake (and recover from it). Now the team has learnt that & as the product manager she’s seen the team grow.

Ro closed by saying that product management is like parenting. You are the one holding the tension between ‘now’ and the ‘later’. You are the one between chaos and clarity. While it can be a thankless job, being the person who understands the full picture is your ultimate superpower.

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Taste, Trust and Craft – Jithesh Ramesh

Like so many of us, Jithesh is learning and reflecting on using ai, including how it impacts society. Especially when we’re in this early stage of something, questions are important. In product, we try to stay in the question space and not jump to solutions right away so this should be a comfortable space for us. It’s in the questions that Jithesh focused this talk.

This talk was inspired by building ai features into products & his thoughts of their impact on society with the purpose of us asking questions of ourselves and teams. While Ai can synthesis research and help to speed up thinking, it cannot replicate the human ‘lived experience’ that informs tasteful design.

Jithesh started by asking us to quickly ask our favourte LLM to create a presentation on the same topic so we could later compare & contrast what it got right – and what it was missing.

Questions to ponder:

• What is the gap between intention and reality?
• What is the simplest creation process?
• If creation is abundant, why should we create?
• Whom are we creating for?
• What drives us to consume?
• What informs our taste & judgement?

So how was Jithesh’s talk different to what ChatGPT gave me? Well it didn’t ask provoking questions – it told me things like ai is creating tools which make it easy to create and ‘execution is abundant‘ but that means judgment by humans is more important (which is shown in taste, trust & craft). Ai can generate many options but ‘taste’ which can recognise quality and what should not be built is important. It even pointed out that ‘in an ai world, trust becomes even more fragile‘ and users wonder if something is accurate or if it should be trusted with their data.

And it says with ai, all 3 of these things are more important since the average quality will fall as the cost of building is lower so a tasteful, well crafted, trustworthy product will be a competitive advantage. 🙂

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My Product Companion- Zain Franciscus

Zain has been experimenting with various ai tools to help simplify his work & shared how he’s using several small Ai assistants.

Using Relevance Ai, Zain created 4 agents – a market researcher, persona strategist, prototype designer and product marketer. His experiment showed they were great for:

• Generating 1st drafts of time consuming items – like user documentation or user stories
• Uncovering blind spots – one agent suggested a value prop that Zain hadn’t considered

The big question – will the agents replace Product Managers? Zain doesn’t think so as there is a long way to go for the agents to be good at stakeholder management or negotiation or even understanding the significance of the tasks.

If you are going to investigate using agents, keep in mind

• Review everything because you still own the quality
• Use ai to shift time by off-loading things like formatting or writing so you can spend time on strategy and thinking and alignment.
• Start experimenting now. The tools are mature enough and the learning curve is worth it.

For more information, check out the talk Zain did at Product Camp (summary near the bottom of the page) and his posts about using the agents.

We all know there’s a lot of hype around Ai and one of the more recent developments has been the ‘Ai PM’. What is an ‘ai PM’ and how can you become one – or are you already one?

Li Xia, is a product person who’s been building Sondar.ai, his own startup (with ai), and shared a bit of his journey plus broke out 3 different ways to view the ‘ai pm’.

Thank you Li for this fantastic talk including great practical examples of what you’ve been learning and how you’ve been using it within your product!

Session Wrap Up:

Adapting a framework from Amar Khan, Li sees the Ai Product Manager as actually 3 different roles.

The Prompt Master

This type of Ai PM use Ai tools to make their existing job easier, faster, more efficient. This could be helping with document creation, prototyping, synthesis, to help brainstorm and more. Based on the show of hands in the room, we’re almost all ai PMs using this lens.

The Foundational Model PM

These are the PMs that work for organisations like OpenAi, Google, Anthropic, etc and build the core tech that others build on. When we’re using the LLMs and APIs like ChatGPT or Claude, we’re building on the work that these product people have made possible.

The Builder

The Builder Ai PM is responsible for creating ai features or products using those off the shelf foundational models to solve our customer problems.

How to move from Prompt Master to Builder

This is where a skill set change is needed and Li stepped us through a playbook of what he’s learned from while working in his startup – sort of like creating your own Iron Man suit.

Setup your Ai Lab

A conversational ai tool like ChatGPT is like driving a car with adaptive cruise control where the computer makes most of the decisions. To truly build, you must use developer tools which let you change the settings and all the knobs that are in the car to adapt them to what you need.

To to so, you need to understand the limitations of the tech, the strengths & weaknesses of the LLM model, tweak the settings, know the cost and drive the output (ie JSON objects).

Li suggests getting hands on with these tools is needed so you can communicate better with your tech team and have a better understanding of constraints.

Build your Ai Brain

The base ai model is a machine without personality or direction. It’s your job to give it a brain, a voice & a personality.

You can do this via system prompts and guardrails which is achieved via system prompts. Li showed us some of the prompts he’s using for functionality within his startup, Sondar.ai. The part of Sondar Li shared wants the system to behave as if it’s a senior UX researcher coach. The prompt defines that persona, ensures it has key context questions and uses specific methodologies .

Because building ai experiences are non-deterministic, it may answer in different ways depending on the input which requires rapid iteration.

Instead of PRDs or similar, Li has been writing a ‘prompt spec’ which he gives to the engineering team. This spec details system prompts, parameters and desired outputs. Sample input and those expected outputs are key.

Give Ai its Senses

Dynamic data is the ‘secret sauce’ – prompting is only half of the story.

While everyone has access to the same foundational models, it’s the unique experience you provide in the product that makes it valuable. In order to do that, enriching the ai with your product’s valuable data is how you differentiate your product.

In Sondar, there’s a ‘Ask Ai’ feature which lets you important & transcribes customer interviews so you can talk to your data to get answers & quotes.

Don’t forget about personalising by using dynamic data valriables like names or other context.

Li found learning simple SQL queries to retrieve data and understand popular data formats like JSON & Markdown enabled him to move faster by getting the data he needed to progress without needing to wait on developers to help.

Takeaways

1. There’s different ways to define an ‘ai pm’
2. You don’t need a PhD to work in this space – focus on building practical skills aka your Iron Man suit
3. Having some technical skills will benefit and help you build trust with your tech team. Being able to query data & understanding API calls are at the top of that list.

OUR SPONSOR

Our wonderful sponsors for the evening – Revity!!!

Revity helps startups, scaleups and established organisations deliver product-led quality software outcomes. We partner with businesses to build high-performing teams, uplift engineering capability, and deliver product outcomes that last beyond the project. From applied AI and mobile apps to global expansion and customer lifecycle platforms, we focus on practical, scalable solutions that drive business value. At Revity, we don’t just deliver projects, we empower teams to learn by doing, so organisations grow stronger with every engagement. Follow on Linkedin

Our March meetup topic was ideation & collaboration – but the real focus was having small groups of attendees get hands on experience by using a specific method – Crazy 8s!

It was a super rainy night in Melbourne! Thank you everyone for attending – including a few folks who were absolutely drenched when they showed up!

The Talk

When we’re looking to innovate or problem solve, it’s easy to get stuck into our existing scenarios. How can we break out of this? How can we, and how can we help our teams, think in new ways?

One exercise that can be used to quickly come up with new ideas is Crazy 8s.

Crazy Eights is a brainstorming technique designed to rapidly generate a wide array of ideas within a constrained timeframe.

Lucy explained it’s a mix of convergent & divergent thinking plus has an element of prioritisation that helps you narrow scope. It’s a very time efficient method and that timeboxing helps you to not overthink ideas and focuses us to think outside the box.

Since Crazy 8s challenges individuals to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. This fast-paced exercise promotes quick thinking and minimises the tendency to dismiss unconventional ideas, fostering a creative and uninhibited environment. It’s especially useful for teams aiming to push the boundaries of conventional thinking and explore a broad spectrum of possibilities.

When to Use Crazy Eights

Lucy likes to use Crazy 8s when

• We know what we are doing but wondering how do we design the right thing in the right way
• When you have a lot of subject matter experts / stakeholders and want to include them
• When you are creatively blocked or not sure how to solve the problem

Benefits of Crazy Eights

Implementing Crazy Eights in brainstorming sessions offers several advantages:

• Encourages Creativity: The rapid pace and emphasis on quantity help bypass mental blocks, allowing creative ideas to emerge.
• Inclusive Participation: By providing a structured yet open framework, all team members can contribute, ensuring a diverse range of perspectives. The individual brainstorming assists with the ‘loudest voice in the room’ problem.
• Efficient Ideation: The time-boxed nature ensures that sessions are productive and focused, yielding a substantial number of ideas in a short period.

How to Conduct a Crazy Eights Session

1. Divide into small groups of 3-4
2. State your challenge: Make sure everyone knows what the problem or challenge you’re working on
3. Prepare the Template: Surprise! There is no fancy ‘template’. Just take some paper and fold in so you have 8 boxes!
4. Start the Timer: Allocate 1 minute for participants to sketch their idea. Do this 8 times so everyone has 8 sketches, ensuring a brisk and focused session. Even though people are divided up in groups, this is an individual task. AND sketching is the idea! Not words!
5. Have each group share & discuss their sketches: Each person in the group explains their 8 sketches
6. Each group should vote on the group’s ideas. What 1 idea would you like to move forward with?
7. Time Management: Assign a timekeeper to provide regular updates, helping participants allocate their time effectively across all eight sketches.
8. Iterate as Needed: Repeat the process to delve deeper into promising ideas or explore new directions.You can take the top 3 and continue to build on them. You can get all the groups to vote. Keep collaborating & iterating.

But wait! Before you start…

Steve and Lucy added a new twist to Crazy 8s as a warm up – first we needed to get out all the BAD ideas for the topics. Since this was a warm up – we did 4 minutes with a bad idea per minute. We needed to exorcise all those bad ideas!

You put down all the crazy stuff in there (we had lots of groups talk about burning things… hilariously). Interestingly, it’s good to put down ideas that have already been done – because that is a bad idea to pursue. People in each group shared their bad ideas with each other.This was good practice for the real session.

With a brand new A4 page (folded thrice) – we had 8 squares. Personally, I found the 6th box the hardest to fill – but that’s where real growth comes. And that includes the art of possible.

The best part is the voting mechanism – because that depends on what each group selects – which changes the outcomes as well. Another important aspect to remember when using this technique!

Resources:

Steve has posted on LI about his experience of using Gamma to create the presentation.

Slides are below

Our Speakers:

Lucy Serret is a passionate problem solver and inclusive design practitioner with 6 years of experience in agencies and startups. She specialises in end-to-end solutions, including research, design strategy, and accessible product delivery. Her commitment to accessibility, research, and design drives her to ask the big questions and challenge assumptions through creative problem solving

Steve Bauer is the Chief Product Officer at 1Breadcrumb, master of festivities at Product Camp Melbourne and owns many articles of clothing emblazoned with flamingos.

Our wonderful hosts and sponsor:

Zendesk started the customer experience revolution in 2007 by enabling any business around the world to take their customer service online. Today, Zendesk is the champion of great service everywhere for everyone, and powers billions of conversations, connecting more than 100,000 brands with hundreds of millions of customers over telephony, chat, email, messaging, social channels, communities, review sites and help centers. Zendesk products are built with love to be loved. The company was conceived in Copenhagen, Denmark, built and grown in California, now expanded all over the world.

Our first speaker from within our community for the May event is Felicity Bodger on discussing her playbook on “How to become a Killer Product Manager in 3 Easy Steps.” This talk is for product managers who want to level up to become killer pms, creating a personal professional playbook will enable you to transform your team of mercenaries into missionaries while also fending off the monster chewing on your leg, unlike your run of the mill corporate values that only have the half-life of a power point presentation.

Continue reading →

Our second speaker from within our community for the May event is Marc Vandamme – Creating alignment with your teams and leaders. Marc is Senior Product Manager @Performio. Loves climbing and is looking for indoor & outdoor lead climbing buddies!

Continue reading →

Our third speaker from within our community for the May event is Nick Kardamitsis, discussing how to go “Beyond the numbers: Harnessing data for smarter product decisions.” Nickolas is an outcomes-focused, customer-centric problem solver, passionate about hitting organisational goals. With over 10 years in digital product experience, Nickolas navigates the end-to-end product lifecycle and leads both technical and non-technical teams, effortlessly switching between strategy and execution. He loves everything about product—especially the words, “Yes, but…”

Continue reading →

One of ProdAnon’s goals is to help our community members learn and grow – and what better way to achieve that than give our members the chance to do short talks to share what they learned and get some public speaking experience. Several people who have spoken at ProdAnon have gone on to present at larger conferences which is awesome!

For our May session, we did a call out for folks interested in doing 15 min talks. And we had 4 wonderful speakers share their knowledge:

Felicity Bodger – How to become a Killer Product Manager in 3 Easy Steps.

Marc Vandamme – Creating alignment with your teams and leaders.

Nick Kardamitsis – Beyond the numbers: Harnessing data for smarter product decisions.

Jerllin Cheng – Responsible Use of Ai

If you’re interested in doing a talk, reach out to Jen & Liz(slack, email, at an event). Typically, ProdAnon sessions are workshops, panels or individual speakers plus we sometimes do the short talk sessions.

Thank you for hosting Culture Amp!
Culture Amp is the world’s leading employee experience platform, revolutionising how 25 million employees across more than 6,500 companies create a better world of work. Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, drive performance management, and develop high-performing teams. Powered by people science and the most comprehensive employee dataset in the world, the most innovative companies including Canva, On, Asana, Dolby, McDonalds and Nasdaq depend on Culture Amp every day. Culture Amp is backed by leading capital venture funds and has offices in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Culture Amp has been recognised as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and most innovative companies by Fast Company.

In the fast-paced world of product management, we frequently discuss the strategies behind making decisions and the art of influencing stakeholders. However, a crucial aspect of the role that often goes under explored is the ability to change one’s mind and remain open to being influenced.

In this session, Lucy talked about the nuanced art of changing your mind—an essential skill for growth and effective leadership.

You’ll have belief 1 and then something happens… you receive new information or have an emotional response or there’s a rational assessment which translates into belief 2. The journey between those 2 points is not always that simple and our own biology can throw a spanner into our thinking.

So when we’re making decisions constantly and those decisions are influenced by a lot of things including our own biological & emotional reactions, how can we grow? Well Lucy brought data & analysis to this question.

First, the let’s talk about the octopus. Lucy gave us some ‘facts’ covering octopus mating to see where we sat on the believe vs not believe scale (which also illustrated that science has changed their mind over time as information and research evolved). She then challenged us with a statement that we product people make thousands of decisions but only 1 or 2 are any good. Yikes! That hurt! Do we believe it?

Bring in the SCARF model (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness) to help us understand how our brain reacts because this journey can feel threatening, can be neutral or even rewarding! Saying we only make 1-2 good decisions in our entire career was tough. It was threatening to our status! Maybe we didn’t think it was fair or made us feel unsafe.

But if you recognise these things are happening and re-frame how you think about making decisions, growth can happen.

Lucy reflected that when she was new in her career, she was comfortable with being wrong. She was learning. It was expected because she was new and status & certainty was low. As her career progressed, she felt new pressures and expectations that she should know what she was doing. When she received contradictory information it was a threat to her status, autonomy and she felt more defensive. This led to her being less comfortable when she was wrong that translated into a slowness of being open to new ideas thus taking longer to adapt to a new idea.

One way Lucy re-framed changed the way she wrote documents. As a product person at Amazon, Lucy worked in the ‘working backwards’ style of press releases, 6 page reviews and starting meetings with silent reading before discussion of the document. While she worked with her trio to develop the document, she realised it was when it was circulated at higher levels that she was getting more clarity and good questions. She decided to be provocative in her statements early in the game so her trio and other peers would give better feedback. She re-framed that the document is about getting feedback, not about being right.

How do you know you’re making better decisions today than x years ago? How do you measure the effectiveness of making decisions? Bring in a 2×2 matrix! Lucy plotted process and decision.

Through this plotting, Lucy took on another belief – as a PM, when we make the decision we need to firmly believe it is correct but then switch quickly into how can we disprove it? How can we look at this with a different lens? What should I have done differently?

For greater success, we can seek out how to make better decisions & change our minds when needed.

Lucy’s slides are available.

During the talk she referenced

• SCARF model
• Bounce
• Evan LaPointe‘s interview with Lenny
• Thinking Fast and Slow
• Naked Statistics
• Wes Kao on managing up
• Escalating Product Decisions – an article Lucy wrote several years ago

About the speaker: As an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience, Lucy Spence has made more mistakes than most and loves sharing her experiences in the hopes others can learn what she’s learned in less painful ways. In that time, she’s gone from individual contributor to product leader a few times at a range of companies from start-ups to Amazon. As a Senior Product Manager at Octopus Deploy, you can expect to see many Octopus-based metaphors and analogies.

Catapult was our fabulous host. Thank you Catapult!

Catapult exists to unleash the potential of every athlete and team on earth. Operating at the intersection of sports science and analytics, Catapult products are designed to optimise performance, avoid injury, and improve return to play. Catapult has over 400 staff based across 24 locations worldwide, working with more than 3,800 Pro teams in over 40 sports across more than 100 countries globally. To learn more about Catapult and to inquire about accessing performance analytics for a team or athlete, visit us at catapult.com. Follow us at @CatapultSports on social media for daily updates.

Months ago, Liz & I were talking about doing an ‘AI share’ as in having ProdAnon-ers sharing how they were using AI tools in our daily work – and it was during a chat with Will Sheers that I thought this topic could be really interesting. 🙂 We had not discussed it more so I was happy to see Will pitch something similar at Product Camp – and be able to have an extended version of his talk this month. AND what an interesting talk from Will!

While Will was looking for work, he created a system that would do a competitor analysis for him – instead of spending hours prepping for the interview. Will shared with us a few ways we can use AI tools to help understand the market & competitor landscape.

We discussed all that goes into reviewing strategy & competitor analysis – checking product reviews, analysing the website for pricing, capabilities, understanding the types of competition, putting together a SWOT- and more. So what are the alternatives?

Easy

• Ask ChatGPT or Claude or whichever LLM about the market, to create a SWOT for a particular business.
• Search for GPTs that can help you. These are customised ChatGPTs which others have built for specific purposes. From the ChatGPT window, there’s a navigation item called ‘Explore GPTs’.

Ask where the data is from not only because of hallucinations but where did it get the data from? It may have done a quick search and used the first thing that appeared. Challenge the LLM to understand where the data is from.

Level up

• Build a GPT Minion using ChatGPT – Besides being able to ‘explore’ the existing GPTs, you can ‘Create a GPT’

AND then… Creating your ai minions (um… agents)

A bit more challenging – Create your own agents to run off and do the work for you! You need to plan out the tasks your team will do and setup an agent for each. This assists with scalability, coordination, complex problem solving and specialisation.

Will stepped us through how he setup a team of agents who had different roles in putting the data together. One agent was responsible for finding product reviews while another would analyse those reviews. A third agent analysed the company website. The 3 agents feed their data to another bot who acted as the manager/strategist. This bot produced an analysis from the data given and made sure the 3 were given their tasks.

Want to start your own set of minions? Will recommends starting with this video CrewAi Crash Course and either knowing some Python or use an AI tool to give you code.

Thank you Will & Culture Amp for a fantastic evening!

Our Speaker:
Will Sheers is a Product Leader, Strategist, and Advisor with a deep passion for AI. Currently, he leads product efforts for the AI & Innovation team at StarRez. Previously, as Head of Product, Will played a pivotal role in transforming LiveHire (ASX: LVH) into an award-winning AI-augmented Talent Acquisition and Engagement platform.

Thank you for hosting Culture Amp!
Culture Amp is the world’s leading employee experience platform, revolutionizing how 25 million employees across more than 6,500 companies create a better world of work. Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, drive performance management, and develop high-performing teams. Powered by people science and the most comprehensive employee dataset in the world, the most innovative companies including Canva, On, Asana, Dolby, McDonalds and Nasdaq depend on Culture Amp every day. Culture Amp is backed by leading capital venture funds and has offices in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Culture Amp has been recognised as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and most innovative companies by Fast Company.