May 30 - Jun 1, 2023
8:00 am
Building great products in today’s economy requires teams to think big, work collaboratively, and execute faster. To do this teams need to supercharge how they work and build products that matter.
At this 3-day Product Makers community mini-conference (May 30, 31, and June 1), learn how others are adapting, fighting headwinds, and coming out on top as product teams. You will:
Our speakers for this event include:
Each day kicks off at 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm BST. We’ll have four half-hour back-to-back sessions, leaving you time to balance event attendance with your work day and personal life.
Come join us and gain valuable product learnings, meet others, and head back to work feeling inspired and ready to put into action what you’ve learned.
Here’s what we have planned for you:
8:00am PT
Jason Knight
Product Consultant & Podcaster at One Knight in Product
Product Managers should always be moving forwards
Are Product Managers the CEO of Product? Probably not, but PMs can have an outsized impact on the world through their decision-making and those can decisions impact thousands, millions or even billions of users. But why does it feel like such a struggle most of the time? Why can’t we seem to make progress? Why is the product management team often seen as “the place good ideas go to die”? In this talk, we’ll investigate some of the root causes that can stall product management; from organizational dysfunction, through lack of stakeholder buy-in, to analysis paralysis, and a lot more in between. We’ll explore some ways to break out of negative spirals and make a true impact. We’ll also consider whether it’s ever OK to ask the world to play its smallest violin for product managers, or whether the responsibility is on us to drive change.
8:30am PT
Rosemary King
Staff PM at Illumin by AcuityAds
Building blocks of product strategy
Product strategy is a complex practice, there are a million different elements that feed into creating a cohesive product strategy, and a million right answers when you seek to answer the question, “What should my org or product seek to accomplish in the future?” PMs with two decades of experience can struggle with strategy. So how can someone figure out how to move forward? Start with breaking down the elements, and then examine how you fill in all the pieces of information that can help you craft your strategy proposal. This workshop seeks to cover the elements that PMs should gather, how they can gather some of those pieces, how to facilitate feedback and what to do next. It will impart tangible and actionable frameworks to try that will help you steer the right conversations in your org.
9:00am PT
Ian Harvey
OKR and Strategy Coach at Outcomes Thinking
OKRs: The key to liberating your strategy
In this session, Ian will demonstrate how OKRs transform our strategy from a neglected document hidden away in a dusty folder into a dynamic and central force that focuses and aligns our efforts. He will start with a brief outline of strategy and OKRs. Then he will use a worked example to show how they connect, explaining how OKRs help our strategy evolve. Ian will finish the session by sharing some valuable prompts and tips to try in your context.
9:30am PT
Aakash Gupta
Product Leader
The 5 questions of product management
What product management lacks is a first principles framework for knowing what work to prioritize and when. In this talk, I’ll walk through the five key questions to prioritize in your day-to-day work as a product manager. Full of tips for product leaders and product managers alike, this will help you go back to work even more confident you are working on the highest leverage activities and producing the right deliverables to advance.
8:00am PT
Lucinda Faucher
Product Consultant and Mentor at TheProdBox
Driving a successful product-led transformation
Having a product that customers love is essential to success, it’s no longer enough to simply develop products that are built to just meet our current sales and internal objectives, or build products that are not focused on delivering value continuously to the majority of our customers. Successful companies must focus on creating products that are designed around the needs of their customers, where they see value and the key problems they need us to solve.
But how do you ensure that your product is meeting the needs of your customers and delivering value? The answer lies in transforming your product management organisation into one that is focused on being on product-led and customer centric; driving customer value from within! In this session I will highlight some key steps involved in driving forward a product led organisation, exploring some of the challenges too!
8:30am PT
Pam Hernandez
Group Product Manager, Penny A.I.
It takes a village!
You’ve read the books, attended the seminars, and followed the LinkedIn posts and comments… but how can you transform your organization into a Product-Led one without being the CEO? In this session, I’ll share past trials and tribulations from past employers, condensed into lessons learned and now actively applied and iterated upon, conveyed as actionable takeaways to kick off the month of June with a (supercharged) boost! These will include:- A balanced approach to addressing (partnering on) technical debt: code freeze/refactor/modular/phased rollout, etc- Incremental UX improvements that scale- Dependency management… with a Product value prop twist- Operational hands-on priority/severity/overall gravity of the situation, to put Defects and Bugs into perspective- Asynchronous collaboration and connecting the dots across distributed teams with product ownership- An ever-evolving Discovery (ideas) Board, informed by cross-department peers- Emotional appeal. For real. — empathy for our users
9:00am PT
Dasanj Aberdeen
Digital product & content leader
How to create healthy product teams: Balancing individual, team, and product needs
Shipping great products requires a team effort. Each team member brings their functional knowledge, experience, talents, skills, and interests to contribute to the whole. How do you inspire your team to work together cohesively while meeting their individual needs? Product leaders have an opportunity to create a psychologically safe environment for their team by sharing information, creating trust, and promoting a sense of inclusion and belonging. When they genuinely care and invest time in their team members’ wellbeing, goals, and growth, they see better outcomes at the individual, team, and product level. Join us for this session to learn actionable steps you can implement today to elevate your leadership and help your team thrive.
9:30am PT
Kalliopi Tsianou
Senior Product Leader | Former Senior Product Manager at Thomson Reuters
Make your team feel “seen”
Feeling seen is a basic human need with an evolutionary connection to survival. When people do not feel seen they go back to their primal brain and the primary concern becomes escaping or reacting. This reality is very far from the team environment of trust, connection and empathy that any team leader would want for the people in their team. This session will explore ways to create an environment of active listening, validation and true connection and also look at the positive impact this has on the team members as human beings and as professionals.
8:00am PT
Rez Khan
Cofounder and Chief Product Officer at Pace
How product and sales can work better together
Even though modern software companies are all embracing self-serve motions (commonly known as product-led growth), sales play a critical role in monetizing their user base. In this talk, I will explore ways product managers and leaders can work more effectively with sales. To do so, we would start by highlighting what the role of sales is in a modern product-led organization. We will then discuss how sales can benefit the product team in building great, highly monetizable products. We will finally end with how product managers can effectively provide the leverage and information sales need to crush their revenue targets.
8:30am PT
Tosin Onibon-oje
Product Lead at Aptitude Software
Building resilience: Learning from failure in product management for super success
In today’s fast-paced and competitive business world, Product Managers face a multitude of challenges in bringing successful products to market. One key attribute that can set successful product managers apart from the rest is resilience. Resilience is the ability to navigate setbacks, learn from failures, and continue moving forward with determination and focus.As a seasoned product manager with many years of experience, I’ve encountered my fair share of failures and setbacks along the way. However, it’s these failures that have taught me the most valuable lessons and helped me become the successful, resilient, and empathetic Product Manager I am today.Throughout the session, I’ll draw on specific examples from my own experiences to illustrate how resilience can make all the difference in product management. I’ll also be sharing practical strategies and tips for building resilience and how it can be supercharged for ultimate success.
9:00am PT
Nate Jones
Vice President of Product Management at Madison Logic
Risky business: How to bet your way to product management success with Nate
Get ready to take a chance on Nate! This experienced entrepreneur, who has a knack for placing bets to learn and scale his business rapidly, will be speaking Product Makers mini-conference at the end of May. During his presentation, Nate will share how making small bets can be a game-changer for product managers looking to conquer ambiguous product spaces and accelerate product market fit.
Nate won’t be bluffing when he emphasizes the importance of small bets – they allow for rapid experimentation and learning without committing too many resources or betting the farm upfront. And just like a poker game, it’s not about being right or wrong, it’s about learning and improving. By taking an iterative approach to product development and making small bets, product managers can reduce risk and ante up for success in the marketplace.
Attendees of Nate’s presentation can expect to be dealt valuable insights into improving their product development processes and creating successful products. By taking a bet-driven approach and leveraging empirical feedback, product managers can raise the stakes and accelerate their product’s growth and success in the marketplace. Don’t fold now, take a chance on Nate and bet on yourself!
9:30am PT
Hedan Zeng
Group Product Manager at Moloco
Lessons from PM-ing in startups
PM-ing at a startup has always been challenging: higher ambiguity, fewer resources, and a lot more work compared to the number of people available. This is even more true during today’s macroeconomic climate. This session will go over some practical tips on how to PM in a startup environment to help your team, your product, and the business thrive.
Register today!
Can’t make it or can only join for part of the time? Register and we’ll ensure you will have access to the recordings and takeaways.
