Brought to you by Chris Dahl, co-founder of Nitro Inc. on the 24th of January at our last Prod Anonymous session.
This was a great session that available as a PDF: Importance of Breaking from the Daily Grind to jog your memory for good suggestions if you attended, or to get across the topic if not.
One of my key takes out from this session was to take a day month as a holiday – clear you mind of the noise and you will come back more refreshed and more motivated for the rest of the month!
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Product Camp Melbourne is coming up on Saturday the 20th. If you’re interested in product management, product marketing or how to build a great product (no matter what your title is), you should attend.
Why?
As someone who’s attended 6 product camps over the years, I’d recommend attending because:
If you want more proof, check out this great video recap of the Mind The Product Conference. This is a London based gathering for Product Managers & echoes my thoughts whenever I see a lot of PMs gathering!
Hope to see you on Sat 20th!
At our September meet-up we had a big round table discussion about Managing the Customer. The topic was proposed because we Product Managers talk about them all the time, but I was reminded by a question put to me by a friend in a start-up about the changing stages of customer engagement. Whether you’re in a pilot phase of a product, a start-up, a cash cow or legacy product, what are some of the things that hold true across each of these stages of interaction? What differs? And either way, how well are we all doing at that?? So I put forth some pre-prepared questions to guide the discussion but there was a very pleasant set of side tracks that came up as well. The wealth of knowledge sharing will be hard to capture here in a simple blog post so I will perhaps share some of the tips instead, but it was a cracking good night.
Do you find Managing your Customer easy or hard? What are your tips? What are you obstacles? What changes with the scale/number of customers?
How does the feedback fit into your product dev/release cycle?
Some tools for capturing said bugs are Bugherd – for the customer or Jira – for logging them internally. And one important call out that I have heard before to get some testing done is the easy to coordinate service provided by User testing
What have you seen others do well that you would like to do as well?
At our August meetup, we played Prune the Product Tree which is one of the Innovation Games (you can pick up the book at Amazon… link below).
I’m a big fan of the games. They’re a much more interesting way of getting to the information you need than a ‘brainstorming meeting’ or some of the other faciliated sessions I’ve attended during my life. It can help build common understanding amongst the folks on the team, it lets you visually see the product as a whole (not just 1 feature in isolation) & it’s fun! Speedboat is one I’ve used on several occasions to help think about issues & visualise feedback. I’ve recently used Buy a Feature during customer groups to assist in understanding needs & to assist in feature prioritisation – and got some great feedback from the attendees.
Prune the Product tree can be used for
It’s really easy to faciliate too – just grab some paper & pens. You can get fancy & print out a tree & create leaves or go really low-fi.
We did a bit of both… some creatively sketched trees with green paper for leaves.
We decided to focus on Melbourne’s public transport. Later someone suggested using green, brown, red, yellow leaves as a way to show the maturity of the item.
We could have spent days working on this – in fact, we did talk about it needing to be a forest, not just 1 tree! With the time constraints we focused on
And of course the tree metaphors are fun! We really wanted to hack off the Myki branch! We wondered what would you need to do to make sure your tree continues to grow? How do you make sure it makes it to 100 years old?
Looking for more resources? Growing your product tree is a great blog post talking about their experience.
Hope to see you at our September session about managing customers!
In our session last week for Product Anonymous I (Liz) covered the process I went through of how to get to your product strategy in 15 minutes. Here’s how you can get to your product strategy in 5 simple steps and 15 minutes (or so!). The methodology below helped me in the battle of the urgent versus the important stuff – happy to hear your thoughts on what has worked for you.
1. Prep – this should only take a few minutes to grab and organise any documents or reference material you might need to look at for your strategy time. My materials were the recently released product strategy document and the original product brief. You are only going to give yourself 15 minutes so make sure you have what you need but not everything ever written!
2. Turn off the devices – you need to be away from distraction, so move away from your computer, iPad, phone or other related distracting gadgets. Bring paper and pen!! Go old school and ensure you cannot be derailed during these precious 15 minutes you have carved out for yourself.
3. The 15 minute brain dump session – this is it. This is the part where you do not edit yourself! You scribble whatever comes to mind and dump onto paper whatever is in your brain. If you were running a group through this type of session, you would have given them post-it note pads and pens and told them to write until the timer goes off. Apply the same format to yourself and find out what is in your head!
4. The finish – make sure that in the last 30 seconds on the clock – no matter how raw it is – write down 3 things you would like to say to your CEO about where you product should go in the next 3 years. You are going to refine this later, so make sure it is just the first thing that comes to mind, not the perfect version!
5. Now sleep on it! – put the pen down, close the book and walk away. Let it settle in your mind and don’t do any refinement until the next day.
Now, unfortunately I have to confess a little bit more time did go into my strategy. Did you really think you could get this done in 15 minutes? Take a moment here to be pleased with what you have done, you have made progress and are further along on the path to creating your strategy. In keeping with the approach, keep time boxing the steps to no more than 15 minutes chunks to keep it from being overwhelming. Another 5 steps! After I slept on it:
Repeat the above steps as often as needed. Execution and further finesse will still take more time, but now you know where you are going. And in an elevator ride with your CEO you’ll be able to demonstrate clear forward thinking. And perhaps most importantly you will be able to focus on the day to day tactical things that will help you achieve your strategy.
A key point that was called out during the discussion of this process during our Prod Anon session on Thursday night: do make sure whatever you have outlined will tie back into your greater corporate or department strategy. I do think a product has to have its own strategy and the two should work together to be aligned rather than everything coming from the top down. However, do ensure you know how much of your strategy will rock the boat (or not) before you start waving it around.
Our next Product Anonymous session is coming up on the 26th of July. Same place: The Bull and Bear, and time 6 – 8pm. Our topic for this session has a focus and there will be a short 10 – 15 minute intro by the Prod Anon group before throwing to the floor for discussion, debate and debacle!
Sign up here: http://prod-anon-july2012-eorg.eventbrite.com/
Build your product strategy in 15 minutes or less.
If you met your CEO in the elevator and they asked you, where is your product going and what is your vision? What would you say?
This session is about how to take time for the strategy of your product, without the prescribed workshops and all the other official artefacts one is supposed to produce.
How do you get to your vision so that you know how to guide those workshops? And how do you do that while you’re deep in the tactical BS?
This Product Anon event will talk about how to get it done in that 15 minutes between one meeting and the next – so you are not caught short the next time you are talking with the CEO.
I (Liz) am going to have a go at it, as my product strategy needs a rethink after 2 years in the market, and with the Product team having just revealed their new 3 year plan, where does my product fit in now? I have so many tactical things to look after with the peak of the life cycle, the new financial year beginning, and name any other excuse – but I need to know where I am going or all this tactical stuff just gets me through the week. So I will present my story (15 minutes max), how I got there and my (new) vision of where I want my product to be in 3 years time, so you can see if it worked! Then I will throw the discussion to the floor, as to how will you get to the same place, why is it so hard to dedicate time to the bigger strategy pieces for our own product. This is where we the philosophy of Product Anon kicks in and we learn from each other.
We’ve been a little quiet lately… between work, travel & stuff in general, there hasn’t been much time for planning product anon events.
We finally had a chance today to sit down … & look out Melbourne product managers!
The next meeting will be Thursday July 26th. Topic & bar to be confirmed (though probably our usual the – Bear & Bull on Flinders Ln). We’ve also pulled together a bit of a schedule for the rest of the year so more to come on this.
We also discussed communication. So far we’ve been using this site & Twitter to keep everyone updated. Now we’ve setup a Linkedin group for folks who prefer to get their information there & a Facebook group probably isn’t far off. We’ve talked about setting up a Yammer group but there doesn’t seem to be a way for orgs like this to have a yammer group except as an external network of an existing company.
What other ways would you like to keep in touch?
Folks,
Liz & I are realising our calendars are swamped this month leaving very little time to organise the May event. Anyone out there interested in lending a hand?
We’re looking for someone (someones) who can help get the word out and/or assist with a topic or speaker. This also includes if you have a burning issue you’d like to talk to/debate with others.
Drop us a line if you’d like to chat or have any ideas. You can leave a comment below (which is moderated so don’t worry if you don’t see it appear) or tweet us @product_anon
Thanks! jen
Hi all,
While we’re focused on bringing Melbourne based product managers together, there’s a Product Camp happening up the road from us… or maybe it’s more like … a short flight away.
The last Saturday this month, May 26th, Brainmates are hosting Product Camp Sydney for the 3rd year in a row. If you’re up for a weekend away & hanging out with other product managers, c’mon along. There’s usually a few of us from Melbourne who go.
FYI, typically there are drinks after the event & us out of towners continue on for dinner after that.
For more info, check out Product Camp Sydney. if you’re interested, you can suggest a topic or offer to lead a conversation or present. RSVP here.
FYI, Brainmates will be hosting a product camp in melbourne later this year (october).