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…”
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:
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.
Lucy Spence – October 2024 ProdAnon – photo by Baani Ahluwalia
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 Spence – October 2024 ProdAnon – photo by Gwen D’souza
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 – October 2024 ProdAnon – photo by Gwen D’souza
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.
We’ll be hosting a panel with folk to talk about how to use your data effectively for product analytics decisions. It will be an opportunity for you to ask questions of the panel.
Mixpanel revolutionizes how companies link product analytics to tangible business outcomes. By understanding the full impact of product and marketing decisions, companies have the necessary information to optimize how they acquire and grow their customers. By providing complete, self-serve, and correct data in an easy-to-use platform, Mixpanel frees teams to move faster, see the whole picture, and measure impact. Visit mixpanel.com to learn more.
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 underexplored is the ability to change one’s mind and remain open to being influenced.
In this talk, we’ll delve into the nuanced art of changing your mind—an essential skill for growth and effective leadership. We’ll explore how to think about decisions, how that will likely evolve throughout your career, and how to handle some commonly occurring situations.
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 is our fabulous host.
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.
Join us for an engaging deep dive into the world of Agentic multi-agent AI, the cutting edge of practical AI applications. Witness a team of AI agents perform a live SWOT analysis, and discover how you can assemble your own AI “minions” to outsmart your competition.
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.
Our hosts: 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.
Every year… it’s like Christmas. The Xmas eve anticipation of amazing food, presents & fun. But this is Product Camp anticipation of seeing 250 of our community, hearing their amazing stories and knowledge they share & fun.
If you have not RSVP’d, get in there! And if you get the wait list message, it’s worth adding your name to the list because there is always movement.
This year our keynote is all about culture! You do not need to be the head of HR or head of the department in order to influence the team and organisation culture.You have a role in creating and shaping it!
Our speaker, Sara Zabukovec, will explore the essence of company and team culture, debunking common myths and emphasising how every team member, from individual contributors to leaders, shapes it through daily actions and decisions. She will share her insights on building a collaborative culture with software teams.Full talk info here
Product Camp is an unconference. What really does that mean? Almost all the talks of our multiple streams during the day are presented by and voted on my the people attending that day. Submit your idea to drive some hype and glory 😉 , pitch during the morning of the event and enjoy the day.
Some folks who have already submitted talks
Experimentation – Running Cheaper yet better experiences – Jack Rust
Mastering Product Management to thrive in any organisation sizes – Teresa Huang
Submit your talk. Not sure what you should suggest? Think about what your coworkers compliment you on? Is there something you could share? What have you learned that others could benefit from? What are you currently struggling with that you’d like to crowdsource help?
Everest Engineering – A bold, people first community, building digital products for those who do things differently
SEEK has been helping Australians live more fulfilling and productive working lives for 26 years. SEEK is a diverse group of companies, comprised of a strong portfolio of online employment, educational, commercial and volunteer businesses. As a market leader in online employment marketplaces that span ten countries across Asia Pacific and Latin America, SEEK makes a positive contribution to people’s lives on a global scale. In 2022, 2023 and 2024, SEEK was recognised as one of Australia’s Top Ten Places to Work in Tech in the AFR BOSS Best Places to Work awards.
Mixpanel revolutionizes how companies link product analytics to tangible business outcomes. By understanding the full impact of product and marketing decisions, companies have the necessary information to optimize how they acquire and grow their customers. By providing complete, self-serve, and correct data in an easy-to-use platform, Mixpanel frees teams to move faster, see the whole picture, and measure impact. Visit mixpanel.com to learn more.
Mantel Group is an Australian-owned technology consulting business with capabilities across Cloud, Digital, Data & Security. Since our inception in November 2017, we have experienced remarkable growth across Australia & New Zealand and are honoured to be recognised as a Great Place to Work for 4 years in a row! We hire smart and talented people and get out of their way. As a principle-based organisation we have a flat structure with no hierarchy. By focusing on our five principles and not getting caught up in red tape, we trust you to get the job done! Our team develops end to end solutions to business problems that help organisations move from idea or concept to delivery and ultimately our focus is helping businesses make human
VicRoads is a government joint venture in the state of Victoria, Australia. We are here to help provide Victorians with safe and easy connections to the people and places that matter most to them, and we are responsible for driver licensing and vehicle registration. We’re embarking on a large modernisation journey and our vision is to become Australia’s most progressive registry! If you think Product, come join us.
Equiem activates real estate with technology that understands people Founded and headquartered in Melbourne 12 years ago, Equiem was the original TenX platform. Now Equiem operates around the globe, trusted by 150+ leading real estate organisations in over 900 buildings. Equiem enables real estate owners and operators to create responsive, human-centric working and living environments, by integrating building operation tools, flexible space management and community engagement into one smart building management platform.
Do you have a dedicated Product Marketing Manager or an entire team standing by to help bring products to market? Or is marketing yet another hat you need to wear on top of all your other responsibilities?
Join us to discover strategies and techniques on how to work effectively with marketing, leverage your own capabilities or bring the right expertise on to give your product the best chance for success.
Our Speaker: Vanessa Sammut is a Marketing Strategist at AlwaysOnMarketing, helping purpose driven businesses connect with customers in a meaningful way so they can grow brand awareness and reach their ambitions. Vanessa has a background in developing and executing B2B Strategies for a range of technology-based businesses. She has built marketing functions from the ground up, growing teams, developing value propositions and working with Product and Sales to executing Go-to-Market.
Our Host: me&u! When it comes to food experience, me&u helps you always feel like a local. The company’s vision is to bring that feeling to everyone, anywhere – so no matter what neighbourhood you live in or visit, you’ll always know the perfect place to go and exactly what to order. me&u is used by 6000+ bars, pubs, and restaurants to create memorable guest experiences and grow their brands. With 200 staff in five countries, and headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, me&u is the consolidation of two leading hospitality technology companies: Mr Yum and me&u, who merged in November 2023.
Product Discovery is an essential part of Product Management and yet, the art of doing it well still remains elusive.
Enter Melissa Klemke, Head of Product at Prezzee, who taught us how to win the Product Discovery game – with a little Bingo! (Slides at the end of this post)
Why do Discovery?
Have you ever worked with an organisation that allocated resources and spent months or years building something big that nobody ended up wanting?
Have you ever caught yourself thinking that because you’ve known the user base for years, surely, you know exactly what to build!
Or have you built something only to realise someone else has already built it and even better?
Hence, the purpose of Discovery is to reduce the risk of failure and uncertainty.
In Product Management, there are 4 primary types of risks
Value Risk: will customers buy it? Will they use it?
Viability Risk: can it work as part of our business model?
Usability Risk: can the users figure out how to use it?
Feasibility Risk: can the team build it with the time, skills and tools available?
While discovery should involve all members of the product trio, Product Managers are primarily focused on addressing Value and Viability Risks whereas Designers focus Usability Risks and Engineering on Feasibility Risks.
In Melissa’s talk, she focused on what the Product Manager can do to reduce Value and Viability risk.
Common Mistake(s) in Discovery
Mistake #1 in discovery is assuming everything will work out perfectly. The customer will love it (value), they’ll know how to use it (usability), and they’ll pay a lot of money for it (viability). Until they don’t. Strong assumptions lead to high risk. But how do some companies end up in that position?
In some cases, time constraints can lead to assumptions being made. It can be tempting to substitute customer research with internal subject matter experts (SMEs) who represent ‘the voice of the customer’. Perhaps an hour of making product decisions with a SME can save an organisation a couple of weeks of discovery – but in the grand scheme of things, saving 2 weeks of time in discovery may not be worth it, if you end up spending months of time and moneybuilding a feature nobody wants.
The thing is, every user is different. An SME is a single person and it’s challenging for this single point of view to accurately represent the nuances and needs of multiple personas. Even more so when the needs are of an organisation with multiple personas and processes to support. Moreover, an SME is a power user and may overlook counter-intuitive experiences for the regular user.
Where to start? Talk to customers!
A quick and easy way to address Value Risk is running customer interviews.
Imagine this, a work desk with you the interviewer, the interviewee and a couple of your teammates who are observing and taking notes. You’re recording the session and you’ve asked for permission.
Talking to Customers: The Script
Before you actually talk to the customers, you need to prepare your script and have clear goals Document your own internal objective of assumptions/hypotheses that you’re trying to prove or disprove along with what behaviours you’re trying to learn more about. This is your anchor throughout the interview.
When you talk to the customer, set clear expectation with the customer “We’re here to learn about how you carry out X,Y, Z process. Your insights will help us shape our decisions for A, B, C”. You are not there to take feature requests.
Have 5-7 questions that will be asked of each customer so that it’s easy to identify patterns of similarities and differences. It’s difficult to get good insights if you’re just winging it and asking different questions each time!
Talking to Customers: Behind The Scenes
Everyone knows it’s hard to take notes while talking. Melissa recommends setting up a digital whiteboard for the team to take notes.
In a shared document, have team members contribute notes. There may repetitive notes or different notes – you can address that later. Just get it down on paper or docs or post-its (virtual or other).
Melissa shared “nothing gives me more pleasure than hearing two engineers argue about what they heard the customer say. Involving them makes them more customer-centric.” It also makes it easier for the team to discuss customer impact and trade-offs for the solution later.
Separately, create a separate space for the team to draft and ask questions that pop up during the interview.
Talking to Customers: Recruiting
It takes a village! Treat it like a program that needs to be managed. Give it a cool name (When Melissa worked at ELMO, they called it ELMO Loop to ‘close the loop’), sort out messaging (“shape our next big thing!) and Expressions of Interest forms.
Leverage your wider customer-facing team members (Customer Success, Account Managers, Implementation, Sales) to roll out the red carpet for your “customer advisory board”.
You can also do – Competitor Teardowns
During the Bingo activity that Melissa ran, competitor teardowns received the most interest from the audience as something new they’d try. It’s useful for assessing Value and Feasibility Risk.
Rope in your sales, marketing & product team members
On a digital whiteboard, break down the user journey. Go page by page and spend 5 minutes talking about each page.
Talk about – likes and dislikes, the clarity of the messaging, what their price structure is (free? subscription? how much $$)
Assess the patterns – what are the similarities & differences between competitors
Decide if you will ignore, copy or make it better than your competitors
Thank you to our hosts – Propel Ventures!
At Propel, we’re dedicated to helping businesses achieve sustained product success. That means not only bringing your product ideas to life, but also ensuring that they remain relevant and successful over time. With our unique blend of software development and product strategy services, we offer a comprehensive approach that goes beyond just delivering a product. Our goal is to help you create long-lasting results that drive growth and success for your business.
Founded in 2016, we are a team of entrepreneurial product strategy, design and development leaders with a track record of building businesses, creating and expanding markets, and developing new technologies that benefit millions of people across the globe. https://www.propelventures.com.au/
