How we ran the Atlassian Product Craft Conference in a remote-first world
Like any good product manager, Atlassian likes hypotheses — and we have a hypothesis that if we can make Atlassian the best place to learn the Product Management Craft, we will be able to attract and grow the best product talent in the world. Our PM Craft conference is the cornerstone of our PM craft learning efforts as well as acting as a platform to create stronger connections and collaboration across the rapidly growing PM organization. With COVID, we had to re-invent this PM craft conference to make it effective in a remote-first world. Read on to hear about what we changed during our PM craft conference this year and what worked well and what didn’t.
(We will also be publishing a series of blogs to publically to share some of sessions from our PM Craft conference. Follow the blog to get notified when these come out!)
Usually, for our conference, we fly in all the product managers from around the world to our HQ in Sydney, Australia. They enjoy a week of learning, discussions and social interactions. But of course, this year was different….we had to rethink how to run a craft conference in a remote world. Like good scientists, we experimented with a number of things, some working, some not working. Our key learnings in this experiment were the following:
- Pre-recorded sessions provided much more flexibility — allowing for a more a la carté selection of sessions plus multiple timezone friendliness.
- Speed Dating is a powerful way to build connections between PMs who don’t get to work together on a day to day basis.
- Not having the existing serendipitous face to face meetings of PMs reduced the amount of connection, trust and rapport that we were able to build, compared to prior conferences.
What is the Product Craft Conference?
The Product Craft Conference is an internal conference dedicated to the craft of product management. We have a mixture of internal and external speakers sharing ‘warts and all’ version of product management, the wins, the losses and the tears.
Why do we host a product craft conference?
- Build customer empathy and understanding
- Create a global community of Atlassian PMs
- Help all PMs better master the PM Craft
This isn’t just the senior folks presenting, anyone can volunteer to present, from new product managers to the most weather-beaten product veterans, we find that great product learnings come from a really diverse group of people. It’s an amazing week for everyone involved and the feedback we have from our product managers is that it’s a highly valued part of their experience at Atlassian.
“As a product manager, I am consistently was blown away by the learning opportunities for PM Craft at Atlassian, these happen every single day, but having a whole week dedicated to the craft really shows me how invested Atlassian is in my growth as a product manager” RJ Gazarek Snr Product Manager Enterprise Cloud, Atlassian
How do you take the best parts of an in-person event and make it better virtually?
From the outset we knew that in order to have a successful remote craft conference, it was going to be a challenge, we couldn’t take everything we knew from the past and just recreate it. We needed to rethink how to do a craft conference in the new world.
We never, not once, thought about cancelling the conference. We take product management craft seriously. The main concern was how to incorporate strong social and connection elements, and how best to ensure product managers were able and excited to engage both synchronously AND asynchronously with the self-paced content during the week.
How did we engage our audience?
- Go to where the audience is, engage them in the best way for them: Based on our experience with team::work (a conference for Atlassian engineering) which we’d tried to run entirely “simu-live,” we decided early on to split the agenda between live broadcasts of keynotes, customer panels and opens/closes and then “choose your own adventure” recorded self-paced content that was available day-by-day.
- Marketing and engagement: We sent out an advance survey before the event, the goal was to get the product managers hyped about the event, aware of the dates, and solicit their advance feedback about topics of most interest, desired activities & structure, which helped inform a lot of our early decisions.
- Social but not enforced: One thing we have learned at Atlassian as we have gone fully remote, is that some people want to engage in social interactions and some people are happy to sit them out. We incorporated an optional scrappy speed-dating/birds of a feather hybrid session to bring in a lightweight, guided while also self-directed social element and chose to redirect other potential social sessions to options for PMs to join foundation volunteer activities scheduled that week.
What did we learn….well….a lot
Doing a conference remotely, we found that the learning outcomes can mostly stay the same, but the networking and connecting aspects are completely different, as are the options for delivering and consuming content.
- Make sure there is a high-quality bar for content — There was a LOT that went into the planning/organization of this. The timing, making sure everything that was presented was of high quality. Every single presenter had a number of peer review rounds to ensure we had a very high standard for the presentations. We also pre-recorded the sessions, this ensured that speakers had a chance to make their presentation as smooth as possible and deliver crisp and clear learnings for their fellow product managers.
- The social aspect of an in-person conference is truly impossible to recreate in a virtual environment, this will always be a challenge and require a shift in mindset and expectations from attendees. The organizing team already knew that the social aspects of digital events had the lowest ROI, and while building a social connection is a key element of this conference, the combination of Zoom fatigue and other home responsibilities taking people away from their screens need to be acknowledged. We investigated a few different options that team members had experienced successfully at other events, but ultimately found they weren’t worth the investment.
- Speed Dating is a winner! The one social aspect that did work really well was PM Speed Dating, this gave PMs across the company a chance to meet with other PMs that on a day to day basis they don’t usually get to work with. The feedback we heard from our community was they loved this, as it gave them a much wider view of what PMs from other departments were working on and inspired some great collaboration opportunities.
The feedback we have received internally from our teams is that they liked the format of the Product Craft Conference this year, considering all the limitations placed upon us. They were impressed by our continued focus on product craft, but like everyone else, they were looking forward to getting back together as a team and the spontaneity that you can only get from an in-person event.
We hope in the future we can take all the best elements of the remote conference and incorporate those into our best in class, in-person events.
We will be publishing a series of blogs to publically to share some of sessions from our PM Craft conference. Follow the blog to get notified when these come out!
