Product Management Festival 2015
Key Themes ● Humanise your product, ensure it connects emotionally with the customer ● Make sure you seek out and understand the user’s problems and fix these ● Curated content is delicious, and machine learning can help it scale
Quote Pack "Victory is damn hard and rare" - Xing again
“Relish the Random" - The guy from Spotify?
"Do something the big guys don't care about and really understand that something" - The guy from the consultancy advising mid-sized companies who are squashed between startups and the googles
"You never have complete information And there is too much of it anyway Make the call and make it happen"
“…in a highly regulated space you can’t really go with a traditional buggy MVP, you need to scope stuff down and sweat the detail" - The guy from the Fintech startup
- Xing, The European LinkedIn (!!)
"Build digital services so good people prefer to use them" - The guy from the ministry of justice
“Look for the 10x not the 10%, ...to get the 10x you need to create new products not look inside existing products" - (I can’t source this, but I did see it)
Working in teams and with others Look at the issue from the other perspective, try to hold a shared context.
Senior stakeholders should Look at the prototype and say I want one of the those
Culture is critical and also brittle so easily broken by removing elements.
Power is gifted from the people around you. Acceptance leads to alignment ..which gets results as it gets round other people's agendas and will .
If you are seen to so something that is working your peers will copy you
People need a purpose and it is not a salary, it's a reason to get out of bed.
Sit everyone together, including the stakeholders
Create a track record of small successes rather than big bangs And when you succeed don’t forget how many times you failed before
Ask people what they learned not what they did
If you are a boss you need to look hard at the skills in the team and bring the right people together to create a great team
Getting over inertia ● ● ● ● ●
In a big organisation pick a thin slice, just one user journey. Discover the user’s problem, make some sketches, build prototype, understand the impact Bin the prototype, move to alpha with the right tech, scalable, etc.. Hire brilliant people to get stuff moving fast and bust through the inertia of big organisations Give this team autonomy to complete the mission, it's not command and control, put the power on the front line, numerous military examples!!
What’s Your Plan? Premium vs commodity .. Resist the inclination to compete on price, go premium. ...Example is Moo.com: The same manufacturing resource as even one else, so they push on premium, humans assign value to expensive and no value to the free stuff ... Sales increased as they increased prices, distinguish on customer experience Emotional vs functional ... You can't win on functionality, compete on emotion ... Example is Robin Hood the online brokerage: same as everything else, but a lovable mission
Niche vs broad ...Don't go for the biggest market, other people are here. Find a specialism and own this ...Example: Osper, pre-pay card for 8 to 18 year olds Relational vs transactional ..The Zappos example with their no quibble returns policy, all paid for and you have a year! ..Extremely loyal customers get you a very high NPS. Play the long game. Exclusive vs open ...And under-utilised trick, make your customers feel special ...Example is "hem" and their VIP list Curated vs a'la carte ...Human curation wins over algorithms ...Example is Spotify and Apple, both have human led playlists ...People want to follow people not machines. ...Taste makers are orthogonal to to data led machines
Compare and Contrast ●
How do you get the whole org to think in small testable iterations?
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Build products for market opportunities not individual points of view
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It's not a hierarchy, it's an effective team that cuts across the org: marketing, sales, support...
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This removes risk, but requires high levels of integration, how do you get to this?
...And again
Multiple Org ConďŹ gs On Display Presi
Swiftkey
Transferwise
Long form
They did have autonomous teams focused on different platforms. Now they have a single common platform team (The Force). The platform team ensure the autonomous dev team can build great features and products fast
Independent product org, but product managers embedded in teams focussed on user groups (B2C, B2B, B2c: mobile, etc). It's not a hierarchy, it's an effective team that cuts across the org: marketing, sales, support...
The value of product is its independence. Its needs integrity if it is to add value. Its role is to define intent.
Full stack multidisciplinary teams focused on critical areas of the business: Currencies: marketing, vitality, etc. Full stack also includes marketing and ops
..in one line
one platform with separate product development teams
Autonomous teams, separate product hierarchy
Hey, I’m the VP of product look how cool I am
Destroy all egos (apart from the ego of the VP of growth!)
...and the king of cool
Obama tweets his product His customer support team reply in song
their user’s data creates pop stars
..and when he worked at YouTube they live streamed someone jumping from space and had 8% of the whole internet on their infrastructure!