Product Tonic Lab Cohort 2 — Retreat Day #1

Following on Welcome Session — PTL Cohort 2 are invited to participate in intensive 4 retreat sessions to build foundation for Collaboration and Co-Creation of PTL Cohort 2 journey. Looking back, this is how the retreat being structured:

• Day #1 : Establishing Roles, Working Agreement, Learning Backlog
• Day #2 : Creating Values
• Day #3 : Building Skills and Mastery
• Day #4 : Forming Working Group & Learning Topics

Centering through Body Scan exercise by Michelle

Michelle Ow introduced us to body scan meditation to help release physical tension we might not even realize we’re experiencing (This knowledge will come handy given the demanding role of PM). It involves paying attention to various body parts and bodily sensations from feet to head in a gradual sequence. The goal is not to relieve the pain completely, but to get to know and learn from it so that we can better manage it. We are reminded that:

• Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional
• The mind & body is not separate entities — what affect one’s affect the others
• Become mindful helps us happier and healthier

More about body scan exercise: https://www.verywellmind.com/body-scan-meditation-why-and-how-3144782

Preparing our PTL Response Card

To help us create a safe space for sharing, listening and responding with empathy as a group, all participants are invited to create following response cards that we can use anytime throughout PTL journey:

• Pass — permission to pass when you don’t feel like to talk,
• Help — when you feel lost, wondering what’s happening
• ELMO* (Enough! Let’s Move On) — useful when some of us are rambling
• ❤️ — Show some love, empathy, appreciations
• ❔ — Help me understand, clarifications
• 👀 — Share observation on actions, behavior, character
• ❗ — Offer perspective through reframe, perception, interpretation
• ✳️ — Go wild!

Some design of these response card comes from Tribeless Team’s Empathy Box — I love reading their journey about how this card comes about https://medium.com/tribelessco/empathy-box-launch-67693f3e52f8

Preparing our Main and Side Quest Journal File to capture our PTL journey

Participants are then briefed with basic preparation needed for the program:

• Starts with Personal Value Assessment and exercises
• Track energy level through PTL journey
• Reflect about welcome session

Let’s check-in

Check-in is an important part of PTL to signal the beginning of session proper and get all participants settling in. In this session, we invited participants to check-in with the following question : “In the last 1 hour, what has been the most challenging to you?”

Introduction to the Circle Way

Our first learning concept is to familiarise with “The Circle Way”, which is a framework we used throughout PTL sessions:

• From the book “The Circle Way : A Leader in Every Chair”
• Describe process from centering, start point, agreement, check-in and intentions
• Presence of Host / Driver, Guardian, and Scribe role
• Participants will be learning on how to practice this model during subsequent meetups

Sharing about PTL roles

Key to PTL sessions are the presence of volunteers and co-facilitators taking roles as Guardian and Scribes. Participants are learning more about these roles and why they are needed:

• Guardian role is like Robin to Batman — make sure the host is in-check: on time, have enough time, or help adjust timing for other activities in case the host needs more time. This is invaluable since the driver might have blind spots from focusing too much on delivering the workshop content.
• Guardian also watches over participants well being so that the meetup is going smoothly DM is much appreciated given the challenge of reading body cues
• Using trip as analogy, Guardian is the one reading the map (i.e. runsheet) while Driver navigate toward intended destination
• We also have Scribe role to help capture key points about what the participants are learning

Building our Working Agreement

Participants are then invited to build a working agreement to set foundation on how we will collaborate with each other and achieve desired outcome : Look through roles — write and discuss what you expect from those roles and how you will communicate & give feedback.

Some follow up comments, questions and reflections when we debrief this activity:

• This working agreement helps provide openness in communication: It is helpful to understand / see in writing about what people expect from the different roles — However, the choices remains for the person-in-charge to do it (or not)
• When there’s confusion, participants are welcome to request for “Stepping back”. This allows us to review, debrief, clarify on why we do in certain ways?
• During PTL sessions, interesting non-player characters like Cow, Cat and Dogs might appear. Why do we do this? As Product Leader you’ll manage a variety of personalities; Therefore, learning how to navigate such behavior will be essential. By making those personalities / behaviors more visible, we can learn how to manage it. So if we see the characters show up, consider how to handle it. For fun, Mosquito’s role may come up!
• How can participants ask for help after a session? — Facilitator and Co-Facilitator will include communication preference in Google Sheets. This is another useful area for PM to try to learn how to manage accessibility / availability of your time to others

PTL Product Person Reflection

Moving forward from group discussion — we now look into more personal goals by having more conversation with each other : Interview your buddy, help them form their backlog and personal improvement kata / practice

• Look forward to the next 4 months: Who has helped you? Who have you helped?
• Sort your learning backlog by priority: What/how will you apply your learnings for your work? What/how have you applied your learnings for your work? What else you’d like to add?
• What are your AHAs? How might you turn the AHAs into actions in the future?
• Your Personal Improvement Kata: Now / Problem? Next Target Condition? What will be Awesome? What will be your First Next Steps?

Check-out

Day #1 Retreat concluded with the following check out questions : What’s something new you learnt about yourself today?

• Being able to participate together with the cohort during some parts of the design! 🌱
• Need more mindfulness practice to focus back to what’s important 😅😂.
• Feel a lot of friction do a task unless it’s adapted to a system I’m already familiar with
• What biggest challenge is right now and how might I approach it
• Instead of self confidence, what I might be missing is some assurance in my ability to bring someone else in another perspective. 🐵
• Learning more about another person in breakout
• Make myself more clear on my intention, expectations, and fear. Also, i can feel free to talk about myself ☺️

Attributions

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