Product Tonic Cohort 2 Closing Retreat Day #2

11 December 2022 — Lean Coffee in Gather Town

To celebrate PTL Cohort 2 journey together, PTL Cohort 1 & 2, mentors and co-facilitators are invited to reflect and co-design what 2023 PTL might look like.

Gather Town PTL Closing Retreat

Welcome Intro

• Yoga
• Triads Conversation

Activity: Lean Coffee

In this session, participants are invited to discuss and plan for the year 2023. This can include sharing what they hope to do or accomplish, any projects or initiatives they want to get involved in, and any changes they hope to see. Here we’re learning to use the “Lean Coffee” approach as a structured agenda-less meeting where participants pitch and build an agenda together, prioritise and begin talking about the items in turn within agreed upon time limit. The meeting ends when there are no more topics on the agenda.

Virtual Lean Coffee Chat (markkilby.com)

Following topics are generated and voted as backlog items for discussion:

1. PTL Retreat in April 2023
2. What’s next as product person after PTL
3. How can we leverage community to help us in our jobs / careers
4. Best ways to learn and get feedback + finding the right mentor
5. PTL cohort 3

Each topic will be introduced by the proposer and given about 6 minutes of discussion in a round-robin format. Participants can choose whether or not they have something to contribute to the discussion, or they can pass to the next person. When the time is up, the group will decide whether to continue discussing the topic or move on to the next one. Up to two additional time extensions may be granted if necessary.

Summary from discussions is as following:

PTL Retreat in April 2023

Based on schedule, budget, and co-host availability, the next PTL retreat in April 2023 has been decided in Bohol, Philippines!

What’s next as product person after PTL

Context: Seek inspiration and motivation after PTL program ends

Inputs:

• Catch up with fellow cohort regarding growth as product person from time to time
• Running PTL helps learning how to facilitate and try new things out, will continue to do so with Cohort 3
• Appreciate the idea of buddy system and how the program has helped in self-awareness as a result of the questions that were asked.
• Continue practising, reflecting and connecting even after Cohort 2 ends
• PTL journey is just beginning — Be creative in adapting the learnings to the workplace situation.

How can we leverage community to help us in our jobs / careers

Context: Interested to see how we use the community along with the new cohort introduced. Keen to have gut check on how people view the community and what they get out of it.

Inputs:

• From experience, LinkedIn community is good place to ask — there’ll be someone who will help
• There’s a struggle to ask despite the virtue of being part of a community.
• Part of the point of the community is to help members know other people — therefore helpful to share ideas with the hosts on how to support members.

Best ways to learn and get feedback + finding the right mentor

Context: Understand the best way to learn as product person and approach to gather and get constructive / truthful feedback

Inputs:

• Bring humility and curiosity to find suitable person and opportunity to get feedback
• Write learning notes, regularly invite other people to listen and be honest about challenges faced. Learn how to manage emotion and read the room (i.e. develop empathy)
• YouTube helps. But the critical part is being able to communicate and immediately apply it. Afterwards try to get sensing from boss/team who can tell what was great or not so great
• Some organisations mandate 360 feedbacks. Develop the perspective that feedback is always given, and we should be thankful.

PTL cohort 3

Context: Seek feedback on how PTL cohort 3 programs should be designed.

In this discussion, we’re utilising P2P (Purpose to Practice) approach and reflect following questions:

• What have we learned from PTL and Why is this work important?
• What principles must we obey?
• Who needs to be included? Is there anyone we are missing?
• What is the structure needed?
• What practices do we need to be able to work together?

Purpose to Practice Worksheet

Inputs:

PTL work is important because

• It’s grounded learning from SEA Product professionals
• Learning in a community is better than learning alone
• The work as product leader can be challenging and isolating — being part of community help expand the perspective and make the journey more enjoyable
• Support growth in the aspects of product that you can’t learn from articles or YouTube
• Insights about how product leadership actually be grown from community knowledge
• Lack of unstructured learning spaces in the market to experiment how we can bring people together to learn, tech, and reflect on long term topics together over a sustained period of time

Practical Principles to adopt

• Keep an open mind
• Be honest and earnest
• Be ready for spontaneity
• Chatham House Rule — safe space for sharing
• Practice self-reflection on how we want to grow

Participants needed

• Senior professionals, Product people with work experience entering product (transition) — willing to experiment, commit time, potentially from different community / regions
• People willing to apply lessons learned and then be vulnerable about what worked and didn’t work
• People who want to grow and willing to learn in an unstructured way (which may be uncomfortable)

Useful Structures and Practices

• Expectation settings is helpful for those recommended into the program
• Provide general outline for the program but let the people decide to follow or not
• Open Space, Lean Coffee sessions that allow different kind of discussions to emerge
• Do more interactions and storytelling sessions on challenges faced
• Consider framing the program as “Guided Mentorship” focusing on community compared to “Cohort” concept where people may perceive it like a course for manager

Checkout: What are your hopes and wishes for 2023?

• Meet in person
• Organise the retreat in Bohol
• Taking time to reflect
• New adventure and challenges
• Do less stuffs, slower but produce more quality work
• Introducing the power of dinner!

And that’s a wrap for 2022!

Attributions

This is a summary notes for Product Tonic Labs 2022 that is taking place from June — December 2022

Product Tonic Lab is open source
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). This work is derivative of Prime/OS, Theory U concepts, #ProductBeer, #ProductTonic and The Collab Folks (TCF) “The Learning Circle v1-v3” and “TCF v1-v5.5”.

Materials in Product Tonic Meetups

This work is based on “The Collab Folks”, Cactus team and many sources.