Tuesday, February 8, 2022
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld):Twilio Segment -- Scaling Product Teams for Success After an Acquisition
There are a host of changes that come with a company being acquired, such as joining a larger organization and integrating teams and product offerings with the parent company. In this session, Jodi will share her first-hand experience leading product teams at multiple companies through acquisitions and spearheading product integration. She will also share best practices for scaling a product organization for growth following an acquisition and building a high-performance team that is aligned with meeting larger business goals.
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Building a Product Champion Network
The people that know our business best, are our business people and the people that know our products best are the people that use them everyday. Building a champion network of employees from your business can not only help you boost engagement and adoption but can also be a great way to get real feedback and build a roadmap that continually drives value for your users.
This session will discuss the importance of building a champion network, where to start and who to select.
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Product Discovery: How to Innovate with Quick Experiments
There's no point creating something that no one wants.
Yet, many teams skip doing Product Discovery with customers.
In this session, Jim will present concrete Product Discovery best practices that teams can start using immediately. He’ll focus on how to create quick experiments that drive valuable feedback while being easier to create and easier to analyze.
With these best practices, you’ll feel more confident building prototypes and leading customer interviews so you can make evidence-based decisions. And as you do more Product Discovery, you’ll uncover more customer-inspired innovation.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld) Cisco Meraki -- How to survive Chipmaggedon: Design and Development of “The New Normal”
You can’t always get what you want. Right now you can’t seem to get anything at all. Whether you’re sitting in an empty warehouse, staring at a smoking proto board and wondering how long it will take to get a new one, or clicking obsessively hoping your new oven will ship, “Chipmaggedon” has landed with profound impact on how you design, develop, and consume.
How do you protect your product in a global crisis? How do you invest in growth and innovation when you’re constantly playing defense? What’s the trick to get hardware designers, software developers, and supply chain managers together and rowing in the same direction?Join Morgan Teachworth, Vice President of Hardware Engineering and Supply Chain for Cisco Meraki, as he discusses what sparked the global chip crisis and recommends how shifts in design and development methodologies can bring communities together to combat supply chain challenges and survive the end of “Chipmaggedon.”
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): What's So Special About Digital Product Management
In this discussion, Michael Fulton, academic director and adjunct professor of Digital topics at The Ohio State University, will discuss the concept of Digital Product Management and how it uniquely defines the intersection between product management and application management in new and powerful ways.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): UserTesting -- Leveraging Digital Transformation to Help Product Teams Succeed
The challenges of product managers are shifting. The pandemic underscored the need for digital transformation in many companies, and often product managers have often found themselves leading those changes. That increased attention is great, but it also puts additional demands on the time of product managers who were already in fully occupied. How do you fulfill the company’s needs for transformation without working nights and weekends? Michael Mace, UserTesting VP of Market Strategy, will discuss the challenges and opportunities and give practical examples of what to do. Topics will include:
• The importance of identifying customer needs beyond just features, and covering the whole customer experience
• How to avoid the order-taking trap
• Balancing the conflicting roles of product owner and product manager
• The opportunities and challenges of digital transformation, and how product managers are using the transition to help their companies succeed
• How to use real-time human insights to make high-confidence customer-driven decisions without slowing down the development process
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Defining Your Journey from Good To Exceptional; Lessons Learned from a Rookie PM
Product Managers sit at the cross-road of business, UX, and technology and have the potential to make or break the product. Good product managers work hard to build and launch products that customers love, they conduct research, develop the product strategy and roadmap, communicate in all directions, and juggle about 1000 other things. But what is the journey to become an exceptional Product Manager? What is the roadmap to get there and what skills do you need in your toolkit?
Maria will highlight critical lessons learned in her journey from a non-technical background starting out in Colombia to leading teams across product, design, and engineering and rapidly scaling multidisciplinary and intercultural teams.
Participants will learn about how important skills such as communication, emotional intelligence, and effective priority setting are essential in laying the foundations for high-performing teams. Additionally, participants will walk away with the knowledge to be able to utilize their core strengths to set strategic priorities for their own journey from being good to exceptional.
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Why the Product Owner/Product Manager Battle is a Myth
Product Owner vs Product Manager, what's the difference?
In this session, rather than fuel the seemingly existing battle between the Product Owner/Product Manager titles, we will go into details of why this disparity exists in the first place, what is expected of you as a Product Owner or Product Manager and how to succeed at what you do.
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Tales of the Team
Product development has evolved rapidly over the years, but there has always been one element at the core of success or failure: People.
During this talk, you’ll learn about how great teams are created and how to keep them great, gaining insights into what works and what doesn’t work through stories of 20 years of trial and error. You’ll learn how to grow product teams from scratch, build them through high-scale growth, startup crash and burns, and through company IPOs. Hear about these things and more while learning how to keep your attention on what matters most -- the humans that make it all happen.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): Little Otter -- Taming the Monster - The Art of Saying "No"
Saying no is hard and is also what makes for good strategy. Saying no is particularly hard when we as product people are expected to build connections, lead through influence, effectively collaborate with teams that we might be saying no to (very) often, and build an amazing product that solves real user problems and achieves concrete business goals.
Product people that always say “yes” end up with monster products that do everything and nothing at the same time. They say “yes” because it is very hard to say no effectively.
If those concerns sound familiar, this talk is for you. Gabrielle will share how you can tame your monster by implementing effective & scalable product strategy. She will send you off with actionable steps so that you can immediately get to work, develop a strategic way to say no, and, most importantly, tame your monster!
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Culture Clash: How to Make Product and Engineering Work Together Effectively
Product Management and Engineering are most commonly seen as two separate groups with separate and inward-facing measures of effectiveness. When the effectiveness of these teams are not evaluated together, the two groups are typically driven out of alignment with each other and worse, with the rest of the company. Although not commonly practiced, there are better measures of effectiveness that will not only align Product Management with Engineering and align both groups with the rest of the company, but will also aid in alignment among executives and recruiting.
In this talk, we discuss common evaluation metrics of Product Management and of Engineering, why they fail, and propose a better structure that aligns their goals and unites them, as opposed to setting them at odds with each other.
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Product Strategy for Enterprise Products
I will share product strategy for building technology based products with an enterprise mindset. And innovating with an inclusive approach bringing customers, research, design, engineering, sales, legal and marketing at scale
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): Wex -- Your First 90 Days as a Product Manager
You just got hired! Congrats! Now what? It takes most new product managers six to eight months to reach full productivity. Most companies and managers don't have onboarding training designed specifically for product managers. This means you would spend half of your first year haphazardly gathering the bits of information you need to be an effective product manager. You need to create a learning plan to conquer your first 90 days. These first 3 months set the foundation you will build off of. Learn what to do and what not to do in your first 90 days. Join this practical session on how to navigate your new role and discover the information necessary to be successful.
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Docs Are Everyone's Business
2020 was the year we began showing our product docs the care they needed and made them inner sourced, because docs are everyone's business.
Our goal was to make it easy for our teams and customers to use and love our cloud product internally, with the help of documentation.
So, what did we learn, and how did we do it?
In this talk, Alex will take you through the then and now journey of how internal engineering product docs evolved and how the community and customers contribute to the changes and how you can do it too!
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Bringing Agility to Product Management
Is agility only for product development? Certainly not! By means of product management being an extension of product development to build a 'whole product', plus for the reasons such as product management being at the cusp of various cross-functions involved in the product delivery- product management perhaps requires to be more agile than any other function. Let us explore in this session 'how', and the 'value' in making product management agile.
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Make Learning Look Like Work
Does your team take enough time out of their schedules to improve their practice? Or do they find that they are in non-stop status meetings? When do they find time to improve themselves as an individual and a team?
Today's roles require experience and constant practice to be effective. Without taking the time to hone their craft your team will not be able to wrangle the increasingly complex world that they need to deal with daily.
If you don’t put aside the time for the team to learn it will fall to the individual. A small number of people will take on more hours to improve themselves but burn out. While other people that don’t have the extra time will improve at a much slower rate through their experience. The core of the problem is that we separate how we learn from the work we do on a regular basis.
In this talk, Chris Butler will help you understand how you should replace, restructure, and repeat meetings to help the team grow individually and together. By making our learning and training look more like work we will help everyone grow.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): Cleo -- What Can a Three-Legged, New-Age Product Organization Do For You?
Being a high-growth, product-led company in today’s versatile, pandemic-stricken world means you need new organizational structures for rapid innovation so you can meet the demands of the business and still come out on top.
One such trending organization model is the three legged product team owning and driving product strategy, product management and product marketing. Modern SaaS companies must organize product teams in a way that enables continuous value creation and value capture.
When scaling, companies cannot assume the market is in the same state as it was during initial product work. This means companies must continuously adjust product strategies to invest in their next opportunity in shifting markets. Adopting the “three legged” approach to products allows companies to listen to customer needs, innovate new solutions that fit neatly into industry demands, and deliver rich capabilities in a predictable way. This approach is critical to driving continuous improvements in value and, therefore, growth.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): Amazon -- Demand or Supply - Prioritized Side for Platform Businesses
What does the ongoing backlog prioritization looks like for platform business model that has users on demand and supply side for example divers and riders on Uber, home owners and renters on Air BnB, etc. This is most tricky and challenging part in platform product management lifecycle. I have touched upon this topic in my book Effective platform product management. I will cover the prioritization techniques, challenges that product managers face and mistakes to avoid while feature prioritization of platform business models.
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): Parenting makes me a better Product Manager
Since the start of the pandemic, parents have had to play full-time employees and full-time caregivers to our children. Far too often, we talk about our kids as a distraction from our core work, but the transition from individual to parent teaches us lessons about teamwork, empathy, and communication. As a Product Manager, I’ve found these lessons especially important as I strive to build products that make the world a better place for my kids and a workplace culture where they can thrive as adults. By sharing my experiences and challenges as a parent, I hope to combat the implicit bias in our culture that says performance at work suffers when we become parents, especially when women become mothers, and focus the conversation on how parenting helps us be better teammates, teaches us what's really important for our users, and gives us the courage to create a better world for all our children.
PRO TALK (ProductWorld): The Age of Product: Winning against FAANG
Companies like Zoom, Slack, and Amplitude aren’t overnight successes. These companies are surviving and thriving during the pandemic because they prioritized investing in their products during the rapid acceleration of digital transformation. By putting their product first, these tech underdogs have established market leadership in categories where the tech giants FAANG—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google/Alphabet—have unfair advantages, such as massive distribution, virtually free offerings, and room for growth. Product visionary and Silicon Valley investor SC Moatti can share how these companies are winning against FAANG by building more innovative products and elevating product leaders to the C-suite, turning their product teams into a competitive advantage.