Leading the Product – Sydney
Melbourne was amazing, and Sydney was even better. Another day of fantastic speakers, inspiration and networking. It’s so much fun being part of the team that puts together while soaking up all of the product management knowledge.
The themes of the day, aptly summarised by MC Rich Mironov:
- Separate what our customers want and need, from what we WANT them to want and need
- Cross-functional trust and collaboration, bring your emotional self to work, your whole self
- We carry around a lot of ideas of not being good enough, but when we share with our peers we discover we have the same challenges.
My sketchnotes and thoughts from the Melbourne event:
Radical product thinking – Radhika Dutt
Radhika calls bullshit on how we use Lean and Agile. Her proposition is that we use Radical Product Thinking to ensure we have a clear direction rather than just jumping into an iterative process.
There’s a problem in the bagging area – Sally Foote
One of the key messages for me from Sally’s presentation is the good old “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”. Photobox have an incredibly sophisticated AI that can do very clever things… but customers don’t always want a computer to do the work for them.
Developing and communicating strategy – Bruce McCarthy
So much knowledge squished into one presentation. It makes me with I had done his workshop. I highly recommend looking at the LTP Blog for more information (link below).
The evolution of product management – Antony Murphy
Sometimes if can feel like product management is a new thing, but it has been around since the 30s. Antony took us through some of the recent changes to the role of Product Manager and how we can approach it.
Placing product bets – Rod Hamilton
Rod presented a deceptively simple process for making product decisions. Derived from his own experience, centered around people and connected to where your product meets the market.
Real communication, jargon and storytelling – Gabrielle Dolan
Telling great stories is essential to product management but not something which is always executed well. Gabrielle took us through story telling styles, what a story is and where it is appropriate.
How to solve big problems and test new ideas – John Zeratsky
From the man who literally wrote the book on design sprints. John breaks it right down and talks about what sprints are for and the best (evidence based) ways to run them.
The imposter within – Petra Gross
Experienced product manager Petra addresses the massive elephant in the room, our imposter syndrome. Through her own career story Petra shared 6 habits of imposters and her advice for beating it.
Stay across the content from this event, and future events on the Leading the Product social channels.
