Mind the Product — London 2017
I’m writing this post having attended my very first Mind the Product conference at the Barbican Centre in London on September 8th; as part of our ongoing focus within Man City Digital, we want to embrace and contribute to the wider Product Development community, we understand events like these (especially this one!) are a chance to listen and learn from others. My plan is to run you through the main headlines I took from the day and more importantly how some of the lessons learnt will help shape how I, and we as a team, work moving forward…
So, the first thing to note…Despite several conversations with my colleague & ProductTank Manchester’s very own Graeme Goulden of what to expect on the day, I was still taken aback at the sheer size and stature of the whole event. From having learnt the original idea to create ProductTank came from a handful of people having a beer in Covent Garden circa 2010, It’s amazing to think how much the idea of product people collaborating together has grown. Mind the Product is now a truly global community of product people coming together with a shared passion of making great products. Bravo!
This leads me nicely into the first note I made on the day from Mind the Product co-founder Martin Eriksson
Product management isn’t actually about managing products, but about managing people, that great products come from great people, and great people come from working together.
Amen!
Saving Time and Money
Jake Knapp | Lead Author and former Design Partner Google Ventures
So to open the batting was Jake Knapp, a specialist in what he names the ‘Design Sprint Process.’ Jake talked us through his idea of the ‘Perfect Week’ and how a smaller committed team that’s empowered to manage their diaries can come together and problem solve efficiently in well thought out ‘design sprints.’ After a superb nostalgia trip on the inception of Microsoft Encarta (Wikipedia Link for those who have no idea what Microsoft Encarta is!) Jake reiterated the point that a product team must span across several key departments. For example when Microsoft Encarta launched, the discussion of how the product would be Marketed and packaged on the shelf (Remember software on shelves!) came too late in the process and that thinking should have been done much earlier in the design sprint. A simple but key lesson learnt that I’ll take from the day.
A Centreline Experience
Blade Kotelli | Experience Strategy Lead, Sonos
The second keynote came from Blade Kotelli , Experience Strategy Lead at Sonos, he spoke about the value in defining the Centreline Experience, by exploring what it is that the user cannot do without? He placed great importance of testing quickly to fine tune the definition of the products Centreline Experience to provide the right focus of the process around Research, Design, Prototype and Testing. A question I’ll be asking many times in the future…
Compare and Contrast
Teresa Torres | Product Discovery Coach
Next up was Teresa Torres a Product Discovery Coach. Teresa highlighted the importance of ‘Discovery’ and the important role it plays in making good decisions when deciding what to build next? One approach Teresa has created to help answer this question is to use an ‘Opportunity Solutions Tree.’ As Product Managers we should always challenge whether we consider enough ‘Opportunities’ It’s easy to get lost in a product backlog without stepping back to understand the bigger picture. Are the solutions or features we have in our backlogs helping to unlock the potential in an opportunity? By beginning with an opportunity it allows us to think differently.
A key take away from the day, a great new way to breakdown a product.
More useful info from Teresa on the visual aid can be found here — https://www.producttalk.org/2016/08/opportunity-solution-tree/
Quality Design
Jane Austin | Director of Design and UX, Moo
The importance of a team. This is the key theme I took from Jane’s keynote, she spoke passionately about creating a shared deep understanding of design as a team rather than a silo’d single ‘genius designer.’ Some of Jane’s pet hates include ‘I am the expert.’ Ultimately any ego should be left at the door when it comes to building great design teams…Hear, hear! Bringing in design at every step of the process also allows the team to ‘Build the right thing’, and ‘Build the thing right’. This was explained with a great story of how Happiness was used as a KPI when building a new in house CMS for journalists at the Telegraph. Designers sat with users to understand where the biggest pain points lay, using happiness and sadness as key performance indicators helped to create a bespoke CMS thet the users loved.
We can all be Creative
Scott Berkun | Best selling Author
Next up was Scott Berkun with a great take on how we can all approach product management differently. Firstly, Scott pointed out that we should look to history to see how we as humans have been problem solving for a very, very long time. All ideas are made of other ideas — Could we as Product Managers adapt how previous problems have been solved to help us every day? Know where the problem stems from. Secondly, often innovation looks weird at first, it’s good to keep some weird around! Scott used the Eiffel Tower as an example, at first it looked weird and the Elite wanted to stop the build before it had even begun! In summary, If you keep it around and re-visit you may see something new. Finally, everyone can be creative! Our minds are naturally creative, we don’t need fancy tools as our brains are naturally designed to problem solve. What happens when we lose our keys? We automatically begin to solve the problem. Are they in the door? What was I wearing? Creative solutions to the problem! It’s down to us as product people to create the environments that allow for creativity, if the conditions and motivation is correct, creativity is unavoidable.
Calm Technology
Amber Case | Author & Visiting Researcher at MIT
Amber dived into technology and the role it plays in our society. The main headline I took from this was simple, technology should work along side us and not interrupt us. The notion that human’s shouldn’t act like machines and machines shouldn’t act like humans, now more than ever we need calm technologies.
The right amount is as little as is required
The right amount of technology is the minimum amount required to solve a problem, such as traffic lights or a toilet occupied sign. These have the minimum amount of mental cost and allow humans primary focus to be being human.
Amber’s challenge to us all : Can you set your phone to aeroplane mode for a day and only check in when you need to? Rather than constantly being interrupted throughout the day?…I’ll try it!…Maybe.
Culture & Spaces
Sarah B. Nelson| Program Architect, IBM Studios
The next slot in the afternoon belonged to Sarah Nelson who shared her experiences working on an initiative labelled ‘IBM Studios.’ This is a company wide enterprise that allows teams to create, hack and manage their own work spaces.
Sarah recognises that the spaces in which we work every day should be designed to help us achieve our goals. For example they should be flexibile to our needs and encourage collaboration, providing an environment for creativity to flourish, culturally we should encourage organisations to embrace this thinking and take back the control of our work space. Challenge accepted!
Machine Learning
Josh Clark | Founder Big Medium Founder
How do we design products in a world of Machine learning? This is the question Big Medium Founder Josh Clark set out to answer in his keynote.
Here’s a few things we should try.
Embrace uncertainty, machines won’t get it right every time, can we build our machines to be smart enough to know when they could be wrong? For example.
Last December, if you asked Google Home devices if women were evil, it would reply “Yes’ followed by a thirty second explanation as to why.
Machines are only as good as the data we feed them. If we have bad data or pre-determined biases then this is what the machine will reflect. Not only are we the product but we are the data, be stringent with the data we collect and know 100% how it will be used.
Who to hire
Lea Hickman | Silicon Valley
The penultimate keynote came from Lea Hickman a Silicon Valley Product Group Partner with a focus on who to hire and developing a product first culture.
Lea spoke at length about how she prioritises soft skills vs hard skills when hiring for her teams and the type of person that does well in a PM roll.
Intellectual curiosity — must be always trying to improve themselves.
Natural collaborator — must be open, rather than trying to be right. Has to be able to work with others, but also someone others want to work with too.
Grit — The person must have a lot of passion and perseverance.
By building a team with the above qualities this then translates to how product teams can operate with other stakeholders and focus on building credibility across the business. This then builds up so that we (as product people)are afforded more autonomy and can make better decisions on the products we’re building.
Final outcome, Lea placed a great emphasis on product teams switching from being task driven to focusing on investigating solutions to goals, outputs to outcomes.
Inventing the future
Barry O’Reilly| ExecCamp Founder and Author of Lean Enterprise
To finish off the day was Barry O’Reilly who addressed how high performance organisations innovate at scale and how they shouldn’t be scared of the future but trying to invent it.
For me, one of the most interesting points made was that management processes and systems are not designed to keep pace of the product market we operate in, for example annual budgeting and performance reviews or quarterly planning sessions. Barry stated that the best organisations have a willingness to support experimentation, adopt iterative working practices and reduce learning anxiety across the business. Don’t be afraid to try new things!
Finally, Barry concluded that the best organisations are not motivated by money but by a common goal or purpose. We should empower our teams and focus on ourselves, how can I make a small change tomorrow that will allow me to improve? Great leaders don’t have better answers, they ask better questions.
Final musings
I could not have been more impressed with Mind The Product 2017, I came away with so many ideas, thoughts and concepts to take away and implement. Huge thanks to Man City Digital and Graeme Goulden for making my attendance possible. It’s great to be part of a team recognising the benefits of working together and sharing with like minded organisations and product people — the very same idea those few people having a beer in Covent Garden had all those years ago…. So much so, we are hosting the next ProductTank event at Manchester City in October!
Join us on October 11th at the City Football Academy.
