Over the course of the day, we had 28 talks to choose from in our multiple streams. There’s no way to get to everything but we’ve tried to capture some summaries. Thank you to everyone listed here who volunteered to share their knowledge & experience!

Photos by m- & Nigel D’Souza.

Post redundancy: securing a job in this challenging market – Jade Dignam shared her experience of redundancy & looking for work which included lengthy interview processes such as 1 possible employer with a process of 8 interviews!

She broke down the job hunt process. Here’s some of her tips for each area:

• Getting the interview – leverage your network, use recruiters for advocacy, have a 1 pager cv
• The interview – nail your introduction, interview them, use STAR or another tool to prepare
• After the interview – always ask for feedback & follow up if not provided
• Missing out – don’t take it personally. Every opportunity is not right for everyone & sometimes another person has slightly different or bespoke experience that is right for the role
• Time management & taking care of your personal mental health – time box applications, have a side project

Get Your Digital Sh*t Together – Felicity Bodger did a deeper dive into the topic she explored back in May during a Product Anonymous short talk and shared how she has built her own second brain.

AI Powered Product Strategy – Will Sheers showed us that by combining lightweight product strategy techniques and employing AI agents, you can quickly uncover product strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats with impressive accuracy. Will’s session was a live exercise where he asked a team of AI agents to conduct research on one of the companies someone in his session worked at.  The agents collaborated to deliver an accurate analysis of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.  

“Multi-Agent AI represents the next evolution in practical AI applications.  Frameworks such as CrewAI, AutoGen, and Agency Swarm offer a great starting point, and there are YouTube tutorials available to guide you.” Will Sheers 

Missed Will’s talk? Come along to the September Product Anonymous to delve into this topic more.

Change Quest –Calum Dabb led a fun and interactive “choose your own adventure” of change management, looking at how change is implemented and how success is measured along the way. Calum used a case study and asked his audience to make a series of decisions, voting on the best outcome. At the end of the session they were able to reflect on how well the decisions they made along the way aligned to their agreed outcomes. 

“Overall, we learned that when implementing change, measuring success is difficult.  We took away some good learnings about how to best stick to our outcomes to ensure we prioritise the right things, all the time.” Calum Dabb 

Over the course of the day, we had 28 talks to choose from in our multiple streams. There’s no way to get to everything but we’ve tried to capture some summaries. Thank you to everyone listed here who volunteered to share their knowledge & experience!

Photos by m-, Nigel D’Souza & Shikha Kuckreja.

Generative AI: Friend or Foe?– Amir Ansari took a packed room through a lightning masterclass on Generative AI.  Amir gave a comprehensive overview of the foundational concepts of this emerging technology, and discussed the economic benefits for organisations who use it well.  He also covered important ethical considerations, and provided some practical use cases to get people thinking about how Gen AI could be applied in their own organisations.  

“AI is here to stay!  As digital knowledge workers, we need to stay across and skill up so we can use this emerging technology effectively and safely.” Amir Ansari 
 

Mastering your Product Management Skills toThrive in any Organisation – Teresa Huang gave us an enlightening look at organisations in different stages of growth, and the way Product Managers need to respond and adapt in order to be successful.  

In the ‘Wild West’ of startups, Product Managers need to be entrepreneurial and responsive to find product-market fit fast. Scale ups are all about bridging chaos and order in the service of longer-term goals, by fostering a deep understanding of customers and collaboration across the business. Enterprise Product Managers must be able to influence and navigate bureaucracy to ensure the organisation stays connected to the customer problem to solve.  

Teresa shared the way that mindset, influence, and the practice of product management need to be adapted to ensure that as a Product Manager you are able to successfully create value for customers in any business. 

What does Sales Led vs Product Led Actually Mean? Craig Brown from Everest Engineering led a discussion about what these 2 concepts are and how product & sales can come together.

What are some of the things we can do together? Some examples: we can share knowledge with each other, understand each other’s processes, celebrate together, work together to develop a customer onboarding process.

What’s your priority? Kate Edwards-Davis ran a session on the myriad of prioritisation frameworks we can choose from including Buy a Feature, RICE, Kano, Cost of Delay, etc. Everyone jumped into groups to then use 1 of those frameworks on a set of assigned features.

No framework can accommodate the full complexity of the real world – but they are still useful to get started. The discussions you have while stepping through a framework are just as valuable as the results of the prioritiation framework. Everyone agreed there is more value in prioritising as a group than doing it by yourself.