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.

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- & jen leibhart. Sketchnote by Rebecca Jackson

Alexandra Jacquet spoke on How to Build a Strong Relationship with your Founder. The key takeaways are:

• Understand Your Founder’s Motivations
  • What are they trying to achieve? What are their personal and business goals? Who or what influences them? Whether it’s a podcast, journal, or someone within the company, knowing these can guide your approach.
• Set an Actionable Plan to Build Trust
  • Have honest conversations, set measurable goals, and aim for quick wins. The active strategies will help you take a methodical approach to build trust.
• Educate on the Power of Experimentation
  • Regularly share insights from customer learnings and data. Bring your founder along on your journey, explaining your decisions and viewpoints with evidence.
• Speak the Same Language
  • Is it data, research, money, frameworks, or something else? Aligning on communication styles can significantly improve collaboration.

Fernando Perra – SQL Coding for PMs – Fernando gave a mini lesson on SQL as he believes SQL skills empower product managers with data autonomy. By learning some of the basics, you can be more self reliant on getting the data & understanding it. He’s posted the slides here on LI

Empowered to improve product ROI: A cross-functional view of levers across the product lifecycle was a workshop Nhat Tran ran to help people focus how we can deliver better outcomes to influence the product & ROI. Check Nhat’s post with slides and here’s the session takeaways:

• There are levers, across the prod dev cycle, that can impact product performance/roi
• Levers can positively/negatively impact ‘return’, or ‘investment’
• Exec and individual contributors can both be empowered to proactively impact roi by owning tasks, along the prod dev cycle
• Some specific, actionable tasks are:
  • Align on the right metrics, specifically ‘when customers experience value’
  • Focus product backlog on actionable metrics, e.g. sub-metrics to ‘when customer experiences value’
  • Minimise team blockers, e.g. via having clarity on ways of working , proactively unblocking future design, tech stack issues
  • Value the product backlog as ‘investments’, with an ‘expected value’, which accounts for expected return, but also probability of success
  • Improve the speed & quality of customer feedback loops, in order to better measure and manage ‘when customer experiences value

Katerina Karanikolopoulos ran the workshop, Getting to Yes, Herding Stakeholder Cats. The workshop explored what challenges we have with stakeholders & how we have approached this. Kat used a tool to run the workshop & below is the summary it provided along with Rebecca’s sketchnote.

“The main themes from the responses regarding challenges with stakeholders are centered around communication issues, resistance to change, and alignment problems. Team members have faced specific issues such as dominant opinions derailing agendas, CEOs resistant to new opportunities, stakeholders withholding information or having hidden agendas, misaligned goals, and a reluctance to listen to others. There are also difficulties mentioned with stakeholders frequently changing priorities, last-minute feedback, trust issues, power struggles, and different communication styles. Some stakeholders were described as know-it-alls, non-committal, or having authority bias.

In trying to manage these challenges during decision-making, various approaches were attempted including one-on-one meetings to understand perspectives, gathering supporting data, openly discussing trade-offs, and using executive meetings to diplomatically raise issues. Other tactics involved using data to tell a story, involving stakeholders early in the process, prioritization workshops, breaking down decisions step by step, and using frameworks to help analyze opinions. Some team members mentioned personal coping strategies such as meditation and imagination to handle the stress caused by difficult stakeholders. Despite these efforts, there were mixed outcomes, with some approaches leading to better alignment while others did not persuade key decision-makers.”