Women in Product DC: “Product, Vision and Clarity” from Emily Dresner of Upside Travel
HUGE thanks to Capital One for hosting the third Women in Product DC event on 17 July, where 50 people were held in rapt attention by Emily Dresner, the CTO of Upside Travel. Special thanks especially to Becky Heironimus, Capital One’s VP of Enterprise Customer Product Management, and her staff who supported the event and were full of good cheer (no wonder — their Tysons Corner office is a great environment to work, and pssst: they have a hundred product management openings at the moment).
In true local networking form, a WIP DC member told us about a blog post she had recently read, that she thought would make for a good presentation for a WIP event. We contacted Emily and she wholeheartedly agreed to turn her blog post about vision and clarity into an long talk for the community. I sure am glad she did, because she hit on a number of incredibly useful topics.
The path from vision to clarity, or idea to MVP to a bazillion more iterations of the P, to something usable and useful, is….fraught. But, as product managers we can reduce that sense of peril by continuing to dig for answers.
Digging for answers is critical to project success. And even more important: getting those answers right. The wrong answers lead to thrash. Thrash leads to frustration and bad product.
Emily also reminded us that when developing product, it’s dangerous to go alone. We should take this:
The four-legged stool of of product development teams (Product, Engineering, UX and UI, Data Science) is only held together by clarity.
Clarity allows everyone to move together in one direction, at the same time, with less communications overhead! Once clarity is achieved… we can move forward quickly with increasingly positive results.
After working through the path from vision to clarity and back again, Emily facilitated a great discussion focused around several questions that themselves will probably be topics for future WIP DC talks and workshops. For example:
● Best practices for removing ambiguity from requirements
● Useful and novel approaches to user science and user research
● Iterating on MVPs to get to something you know you must build
We’re thrilled that so many new people came out to hear Emily’s talk, and to network with other product managers, product designers, and all the different types of folks responsible for product development. We look forward to our August event in DC and hope to see you all there! In the mean time, stay in touch via the main Women in Product Facebook group and the Women in Product DC Facebook group.
Keep on shipping!
- Julie & Stephanie
