Learnings from Leading the Product

Bo Ren from Facebook taking a Live Photo before her session about Designing Products for Behavioural Change

Despite the growing recognition of the craft of Product Management, I’ve always found it challenging to compare notes with product managers from other companies in person.

While product meetups and start-up/web/tech/UX/agile conferences do this to some degree, they’ve never had quite the product pulling power I’d hoped for. This changed for myself and over 300 product managers in October with the first Leading the Product conference in Melbourne, Australia — it was handy that I work for SEEK and we were a sponsor!

For me, Leading the Product highlighted the sheer size of the domestic product talent pool and provided a terrific opportunity to rub shoulders with experienced peers from Facebook, Yammer, Realestate.com, Carsales.com, Zendesk, MYOB, Xero, Envato, 99designs, Aconex and many, many more.

It’s worth highlighting a number of key take-outs from the day that will influence my own approach to building compelling products …

Don’t underestimate the role of emotion in your product’s success

This was a stand-out theme for me. As product managers, it’s easy for us to become overly rational, objective and quantitative. While numbers are important, we should remember that users are human and thus have emotional drivers.

Here are a few specific examples that have already changed how I approach product.

1. Context impacts behaviour in ways that may not seem rational — Matthew Lipscomb, Group Product Manager for Cochlear medical devices provided an example of this when he explained that people with the same level of hearing impairment will have different levels of motivation to address the impairment. People who gradually lose hearing were much less likely to seek help compared to those who lost their hearing more rapidly.
2. Benchmarking is a powerful motivator — Bo Ren from Facebook provided a great story of how users are much more sensitive to benchmarking rather than objective motivators. The example she provided was around reducing energy consumption — “lowering costs” and “being a responsible citizen” did not resonate at all relative to the power of “you use more than your neighbour”!
3. Break automatic habits — Neil Doyle from DeltaMV provided a range of insights from his experiences in using behavioural economics and neuroscience to understand buyer behaviour. He highlighted that we may need to break some reflex habits to achieve a better outcome. His example was that people in a bar tend to pocket their change when it is handed to them but tend to leave it when it is returned on a tray where pocketing it requires more effort and questions around perception (I’ve always wondered about those trays!).

Among the range of great books on this, Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was a regular recommendation.

Understand the frame for A/B testing

Possibly my favourite session of the day was from Lindsay Matthews who spoke extensively about her A/B testing frameworks and experiences at Yammer.

Three important learnings really resonated for me below.

1. Ensure you’re optimising for global metrics — as we release new products and features, it’s easy to get obsessed about the measures for that specific outcome. The danger is that we lose focus on what the impact is on global game-changing metrics. The example Lindsay used was improvements to the onboarding process to improve engagement on Yammer: the initial exhilaration of seeing the onboarding metrics change were soon deflated once they realised the change had not improved engagement.
2. Not every product change needs to be tested — this really highlighted the realities that proper A/B testing is usually not free in that it usually takes technical overhead. To this end, we need to be selective in testing what is truly important to test and otherwise taking an informed leap of faith.
3. Prepare to be surprised by your users — pretty well every product manager will have experienced this at some stage. Lindsay had a great example of an old page looking horrible on a mobile device but it massively outperformed the first version of the much more mobile friendly version. As always, design and experience do not always correlate.

Be decisive

As product managers, we make decisions every day and draw on a range of sources to inform these decisions. In addition to the emotional and quantitative approaches already touched on, the theme of get-out-of-the-building was highlighted as a powerful way to better understand your customers — how they use your product in their own lives and in the context of their own environment — the latter is of immense importance to Barrie Barton who spoke from Right Angle Studio where they are focused on inner-urban audiences for their The Thousands city guides.

In light of these sources — as well as the range of views from our peers and other collaborators — someone, at some stage, needs to make a decision on what the product will be. This is often with incomplete information and occasionally despite opposing views. Barrie’s presentation highlighted the importance of this decisiveness to drive truly visionary outcomes. My own takeout from this as a product manager is ensuring we make these bold decisions when they need to be made.

In his own words: “Think human. Trust instincts. Have confidence. Be opinionated. Remain critical.”

Finally — a big thanks to everyone who was able to attend Leading the Product, the team from Brainmates who worked so hard to bring it together, the range of really great speakers for sharing their thoughts and product experiences, IAG’s Michael Bromley for being a terrific host, and obviously the generous sponsors.

I look forward to the next one in 2016!