Three innovations at this year’s virtual New York Product Conference to uplevel your product game
Product community —
My co-organizers (Ami Stuart, Seanita Tolliver, and Dan Storms) and I are very excited for this year’s NY Product Conference coming October 29, 2020. Each year we update the event to better serve the product community, and this year we have three innovations we think you’ll like:
1. Same mission, different tactics: we rebuilt the event “product” to fit user needs
Each year’s NY Product Conference has aimed to uplevel the craft of product within the community through 1) relevant conversations aimed at real skill development and examples, 2) lessons learned by building NY’s great tech companies and 3) connecting the community together.
How do we accomplish these goals through an online event? Any product changing platforms, like in ‘person photos > online photo albums > Instagram,’ etc. benefits most when taking advantage of the new platform’s uniqueness.
Like you, we’ve found virtual events that copy and paste in person events to miss some magic. Like how ‘in person photos > simple online photo sharing’ copied over features but missed something. What are the Instagram-like features for online events? For us, that means the ability to:
- Pre-record and edit some video to make the presentation sessions richer and tighter
- Enable speakers to do live Q&A during the talks to really engage with the community
- Mail fun things to attendees’ homes to link ourselves together in the experience
- Facilitate community networking (with trained facilitators) in a scalable way
Some of these innovations will work great. Some will fall flat. And we’ll continue to learn — each year the conference’s NPS has increased, as the number of attendees has increased, based on trying new features and keeping the good ones!
2. The talks and speakers are as topical as ever
Every year the conference team looks to raise time-sensitive product topics and invite an inclusive, representative set of thought leaders to the stage. In 2020, this means to us:
- Flourishing in a time of massive disruption, and which bets to make (Eric Kinariwala/Capsule)
- Strong communication is even more important when we’re all remote (Claire Vo/Optimizely, Breana Jones/Vice Media)
- Building inclusively for all your users, not just the majority ones (Jimena Almendares/Facebook)
- When we’re all working from home and location matters less, there is more opportunity to move international (and how to do it!)(Ray Flournoy/Etsy)
- Competing against the biggest companies in an environment that favors scale (Nate Stewart/Cockroach Labs)
- More broadly, leading ethically in a time of massive social disruption (Ezinne Udezue/Procore, Gaby Fraga Peña/Obama Foundation, Victoria Teshome/Greenhouse, Elayne Safir/The Knot Worldwide)
3. This year’s event unlocks more potential to uplevel your entire team
The product conference has always been built to support individual and team upleveling. Each year we make a special call out to attending teams, who learn at the event and discuss those learnings back in the office to reinforce each other’s growth.
One conference limitation for supporting teams has been the need to come into Manhattan on a Saturday — limiting folks with family obligations or geographic limitations. Within those constraints, we’ve still had more than 10 teams of 5+ people attend the event each year.
These year’s product conference is on a weekday (Thursday, October 29) and is virtual — enabling full teams to attend. (The cost is also significantly lower.) We’ve already seen several teams of 20+ people sign up. Those teams will be able to message each other during the event, network together and separately, and more easily bring the learnings back together to uplevel the craft of product in their broader teams.
The NY Product Conference is a labor of love from the organizers (who all have other jobs) — we are excited to share the love again next month. See you there!
