Unbox 2018: What We Learned
On October 12, Boston Product held its second annual conference, Unbox. We wrote all about what we learned with last year’s launch, and we wanted to continue that tradition since we believe in iterative development and we encourage idea sharing within our community.
Know Your Beachhead
Feedback from Unbox 2018 was largely positive. In our post-event survey, our NPS was a very respectable 52, and two thirds of respondents said they would attend again next year. Of course, there was some criticism and negative opinions. We read through all of it and took the rational stuff to heart. We also looked at the backgrounds of the people who didn’t find as much value in Unbox. Some of them were very new to product, and others were founders who were acting in a product capacity. That’s not who Unbox was for this year.
It should go without saying: we want anyone that gets a ticket and comes to Unbox to have a good time and leave with some useful new idea, connection, or inspiration. But you can’t be successful trying to please everyone. Based on the makeup of the larger Boston Product community, and our earlier research on what this group wanted to learn, we built an agenda targeted at experienced frontline product managers. We wanted to address the challenges that come with increased responsibility in PM: transitioning from individual contributor to manager, communicating with non-product executives, having more of a say in strategic direction, and playing a larger role in company culture.
Overall, our promotion was improved from last year. The majority of our attendees were in our target demographic. Next year, we could be even clearer in our messaging about who we think will benefit from Unbox. We might even have a list of reasons why people shouldn’t come to Unbox—like a bizarro Jeff Foxworthy conference organizer.
We could take steps to make sure that any ticketed attendee has a better time at Unbox by having a broader range of sessions. That could come at the cost of focus, and potentially impact our ability to give experienced frontline PMs a great day.
The lesson: pick a specific audience you want to serve, and serve them well. Then worry about how other people are reacting.
Raffles are Just Bribes Marketing Paid For
We wanted to encourage more audience participation this year, and there were specific ways we wanted this participation to manifest. We put a three-item checklist on the back of every badge, and—as explained in the conferences opening remarks—anyone who dropped off a “completed” badge at the end of the day was entered to win a nice pair of wireless headphones. Seemed like a fair deal to us.
It went okay. We had a decent number of completed badges at the end of the day, and the winner definitely appreciated the headphones. But how would participation have been different if there was no raffle, and just the checklist? In other words, I think that putting the checklist in an easily accessible place, and calling attention to them at the beginning of the day was more helpful than offering the headphones.
We also offered an even bigger prize for the best recap article — since there’s more effort involved. As of this writing, there have been no recaps (except this one).
We should have put more work in upfront to understand people’s motivations, and invested in moving our behaviors higher up the y-axis. By making clearer why tweeting about Unbox or writing recaps is important to us—or better yet, why it should be important to them—it creates intrinsic motivation, and that, more than some financial incentive, gets people to alter their behavior.
The lesson: Understand your audience’s motivations and abilities so you can design effective prompts for your desired behaviors.
Here’s the Story…
After last year, we knew we needed to do a better job with communication leading up to Unbox. We did that. Some people actually called out our pre-event emails in their feedback as something they appreciated.
However, it wasn’t until a few days before the event that I — with a major assist from my wife — figured out a cohesive way to explain how all of Unbox’s “features” tied together. I could explain why we send an Introvert’s Guide two days in advance, why we ask for clothing donations instead of giving away free t-shirts, and why we design custom games for product managers. But what’s the common thread that makes all of these decisions right for Unbox? They exemplify Boston Product’s community values: empathy, inclusivity, and gratitude.
By stating these values upfront at the conference, we set norms for how others should behave. That’s huge. What I realized is that when you have a thematic current running through an event (or a product), it helps people fill in the gaps when you don’t have explicit instructions or messaging. If we’d figured this out earlier in our planning process, we could have incorporated our values more explicitly into all the other decisions we were making.
Put another way: narratives are a very powerful tool for setting expectations. We use Jobs to Be Done or the “As an x I want to y so that I can z” user story template because it lets everyone developing the solution understand the user’s motivations, and that lets them fill the gaps during implementation. If the story is, “As a working parent I want to schedule a dentist’s appointment for my son so I can get back to work as quickly as possible,” you’re going to optimize for speed and simplicity over, say, information density as you would if the story read, “As a working parent I want to schedule a dentist’s appointment for my son so I have the peace of mind that he’s getting the best oral care possible.”
Next year, we’re going to commit to a theme earlier in our planning and let that guide our decisions for a more focused event.
The lesson: Build a narrative for your offering. It lets people connect to your deeper purpose and make better assumptions about your intentions.
It’s Not a Marathon Or a Sprint, It’s a Medley
No matter how you slice it, a one-day professional conference takes a lot of energy. In the first two years, we’ve tinkered with start times, session length, physical movement, and coffee breaks to help keep people’s energy up.
We scheduled 15-minute breaks between every session this year. Part of that was to have a bit of a buffer in case people go over time. It was also a chance for folks to stretch their legs, check their email, or catch a breath.
Inevitably, though, people start to lose steam towards the end of the day.
Networking takes energy. Taking notes and active listening in a workshop takes energy. Even eating lunch takes energy. An afternoon coffee or a sugar kick is only going to treat the symptom, not the problem.
Instead of trying to keep energies high all day, next year we’re going to embrace low-energy moments so people don’t feel pressured to keep their energy up for 8+ straight hours. Perhaps a longer afternoon break? Yoga session? Nap pod? Room that just has Bon Iver playing?
The lesson: when designing an experience, you should recognize the natural highs and lows and optimize for those moments rather than try to force them to be something they shouldn’t.
Until Next Year
It was our great pleasure to offer Unbox 2018 to our community. This event takes a shitload of work, and there were days when we wondered if it was worth it. We got a very resounding yes based on people’s faces and their feedback after the event.
It’s our mission to help Boston thrive as a city by making sure its product talent is helping companies win. With each Unbox, if we feel like we’re getting just a little bit closer to that goal, that’s enough to keep going.
Thanks to Dvora Gautieri, Olga Stroilova, Ian Leaman, Aakar Shroff, Valerie Zhao, Sunish, David Callahan, and Greg Sham for their help delivering an incredible day.
Thanks to our incredible lineup of speakers for making time to impart their wisdom: Amy Spurling, Sam Clemens, Jonathan Kim, David Murgatroyd, Emily Levada, Karen Rubin, Oliver Young, Parul Singh, vanessa.ferranto, Nichole Mace, Briscoe Rodgers, Jaclyn Perrone, Kathy, Mina Hsiang, Yasmin Mandviwala (Kothari), marcotuts, and Greg Sham.
If you share our vision and want to help support Boston Product, you can read about us here or contact us at hello@bosproduct.com.
