Product Tonic Unconference (Online) 2018 — Debrief and What’s Next?

An important part of learning is self-reflection. This is my reflection for Product Tonic Unconference (Online) 2018 held on 31st October 2018 180–2130 GMT+8 via Zoom video conference.

How do you feel ?

Glad that the unconference is wrapped up! What seems like 3 hours to most participants has actually been a long conversation and activities since late 2016 to 2018. I’m very grateful for the support of fellow organisers (Colin Pal, Kwok Chung Yew, Mulyadi Oey & Sander Veraar+ a huge signal boost from other organisers in SEA + AU) for making this a success.

I’m energised and excited about what is coming next as we work on the roadmap for learning with the different product communities in Southeast Asia. This brings together past 5 years of work with various organisers and communities to always be bridging and forge meaningful relationships for our work and life.

What happened ?

In April 2018, we organised a Product Gin & Tonic Retreat in Bali, Indonesia with support from Outpost Ubud, Mike Dickinson, Mohammed Pitolwala & Daylon Soh and made it possible for 43 product people to connect across 4 major themes :

• Changing Culture (by setting things on fire)
• Scaling Product Teams
• Build Better Relationships + Make Meaningful Something
• Building Product Community in SEA (and beyond)

For the October 2018 unconference, 93 participants signed up with 72 people joining the shared Trello board. Participants came from 9 countries (Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand & Vietnam). The unconference averaged +55 people into breakout session 2.

While almost everyone was either at home or in the office for the call. We had 2 participants dial in while driving home from work! (Guess where they are from?)

Topics covered

• [Keynote] Scaling the Product Manager: Moving from a start-up to a large organisation (Sharon Anne Kean)
• [Keynote] Reducing Waste (Josephine Wong)
• How do product people learn? What / where are their best sources of learning outside of work ? (Michael Ong) (28 votes)
• How do you handle product feature prioritization while maintaining happy stakeholders? (Albert Padin) (24 votes)
• What are the best practices when it comes to testing ideas ? (Arifur Rahman Chowdhury) (15 votes)
• Models of integrating UX/PD in varying sized (scale) orgs (Ridzwan Aminuddin) (13 votes)

Amazia in the main tent was an important space to share freely and also for people who were a little lost. We talked about Lego, Voltron, Dial-up modems. Wen Huang one of the first product person I’ve interacted with since 2013 (maybe even earlier thanks to a project that shall not be named) is frequently found in spaces like Amazia.

• Amazia in Main Tent (8 votes)
• To look at the broader applications of product management (Sander Veraar) (7 votes)
• HMW run design research as a product, where org-wide questions feed into discovery sprints to complement projects + grow customer insight? (Samantha Yuen) (7 votes)
• Does your company use a structured company goal-setting system like OKR? If yes, do you think it’s useful to scale your product (or coordinate with other teams)? (Mulyadi Oey) (7 votes)
• How might we solve problems and release basic versions of them that scale? (Preston Matsuwaki) (5 votes)
• Checklist of documents every project should have (Ashley Uy) (5 votes)

How often do you see people from a few countries share openly and collaborate together on bodies of knowledge for a community? Doing this in person is expensive and online conferencing provides some huge benefits of saving on air flights.

Topics remaining in Marketplace

• How might we reduce waste in the way we design, create and use products ? (Michael Ong) (6 votes)
• Sustaining a product community for learning and growth in South East Asia (and beyond) (Michael Ong) (5 votes)
• agile roadmap without the expense of clear product vision (Isaac Heng Wai Tan) (5 votes)
• Recommendations when you run out of white boards and walls in the office? (Preston Matsuwaki) (1 vote)
• Any product design team is practicing agile? Sharings / learnings / retrospective (Bryan Yuen) (1 vote)
• Wider or different application of product management within organisations, networks, and ecosystems (Wei Kong)
• Product driven business or business driven products? (Andre Tan)

We learnt a LOT about organising the unconference with Trello thanks to Sander Veraar the Board Master

This caps off an initiative back from 2016 when we co-designed the learning journey for a community member in #ProductBeer (and other communities). Part of the learning journey was to help expose new ideas and concepts to the community, provide mentorship and complete side projects (retreat and unconference seem like good ways!).

Workshops in late 2016–2017 with conversations around designing the learning loops for a community member. Notice Colin was able to join us from PM Huddle (Malaysia!)

We discovered shared history and also some shared triggers around encountering a product related related problem, exposure to new ideas and concepts, mentorship and completing side projects together.

Many of the group who helped shape the direction of 2017–2018 have either taken part in the retreat or the unconference.

In 2017, we worked with different communities like PM Huddle (Malaysia) to test out new formats and this was also done in Jakarta Product Group and Product PH. Photo credit Colin Pal

I’m glad that when I reached out to Colin in 2018 prior to the retreat, he had agreed to co-host the unconference. After the retreat, this became even more of a reality but our planned August 2018 had to be pushed to October 2018 after a good dose of banana leaf rice and facing the reality both of us had done very little work!

In brief

• Back In 2013, 10 of us came together to think about what our community of learning would be and where we wanted to spend our time. We intentionally had half the group more mid-senior experience and half the group who are newer to the world of product development (i will include ux, etc topics into this). Through this, we had setup a set of operating values and focus areas for ourselves to explore in.
• 2015, I interviewed 20 people (mix senior to junior) around their challenges for learning and the type of environment that would be suitable to get closer interactions as compared to what we were observing in meetups like UXSG etc. This formed into #ProductBeer (in Singapore)
• 2016, this expanded to Jakarta and also Malaysia (still fairly small groups). We took time to conduct more informal research based on topics discussed and 1–1 and learnt that more people wanted higher interaction and ways to find mentors, get exposure to new ideas and concepts and work together on side proejcts.
• 2017, we expanded towards bridging other communities we have believed to have successful engagement to find out who might we work with for a larger program of identifying mentors and coaches in the world of product development. This was tested in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Jakarta.
• April 2018, those identified of having a wider appetite for learning were invited to Bali retreat 2018 where 43 people took part. Almost half the group are community organisers with the other half highly engaged in communities or are in mid-senior level positions in their careers.
• October 2018, an open unconference was organised with the goal of reaching out to as many people as possible across all the different learning communities (with a focus on Agile, UX, Product).

What did you learn ?

I’m grateful that many people have showed up and committed time and their energy to making the activities a success.

My first experience with open space (in person) was via Agile Singapore in 2010. Before that I had experienced Barcamp in 2008 but only when I started organising my first open space at UXSG in 2013 did I truly appreciate the five guiding principles. Over the course of 2013 to 2018, I would continue to facilitate open space both in community and client work. Later in September 2017, I got to hear from Harrison Owen himself at OSACON and the inspirational group of people who showed up to share openly. It was unlikely any conference experience before with many people meeting for the first time and yet open to sharing and giving knowledge.

The law of 2 feet works even more amazingly enough in a digital space with the ability to view multiple spaces at once through the shared notes. Depending on how I wish to use my time and energy, I could be focused on one screen and yet keep an eye on the pulse of the events via Trello and the Zoom main tent.

With open space being such an unstructured format, it can be a little jarring for people used to single track, multi-track curated events. I believe there is a need for unconferences to bring balance to our learning needs in the communities we belong to. Voting and committing to facilitate and document topic discussions makes a better use of time/space for people who choose to spend an evening with us. As organisers in community, it’s important for us to balance showing shining examples of speakers/content AND the knowledge and wisdom of the group.

How does this relate to the real world ?

There is an increasing imposition of knowledge and information on our attention. The current format of meetups and conferences tends to have a large group of people listening and taking little action towards moving from me to we. Over time, communities lose their most engaged members and precious knowledge gained is lost.

How might we better design communities for forge meaningful relationships and show up?

What if ?

Instead of meetups/conferences that attempt to curate the best speakers and their content, we open up the world of possibility from all levels within a community (from experienced to junior practitioners). Let’s challenge ourselves to share openly, listen attentively and work together to create useful bodies of knowledge to level up our work. Perhaps in so doing, we also act as mentors to others and lead the conversations in the communities we belong to.

What next ?

In April 2019, we head back for a retreat with 42 people in Taiwan. With the roadmap, there is at least 2 retreats to go with a number of unconferences planned.

Would you like to help contribute to this roadmap of learning for a product person in Southeast Asia? Join us at #ProductBeer or Find a community to start with in your country.

Thanks to the efforts of folks like Ivan Darmawan, Stanly Lau, Tze Chin Tang, Quang Nguyen, Tomas Li, Wisnu Adityo, Colin Pal, Yi Chiao Cheng, Oscar Lopez Alegre, Bryan Casper Chan, Yana Yoshihiro Yanagisawa, Antoni Lewa, Siva Sivagamasundari, Adrienne Tan, Elymar Apao, Ketut Sulistyawati, Daniel Szuc, Kevin Darmawan, Andre Tan across their network and 20 learning communities, we were able to reach out to 93 participants who signed up for the unconference.

A special mention goes out to the group who helped craft this initiative back in late 2016–2017 Wei Kong, Ping Ting Soh, Mohammed Pitolwala, Raven Chai, Zach C, Wen Huang, Anh Han, Isaac Chua, Adrian Koh, Solihin Jinata (SJ), Lena Quek, Ryan Tan, Alvin Zhang, Mandi Lee, Kai Leow, Donovan Tan, Silvia Thom, Yangzi Dong