5 Practical Tips to Improve Managing Stakeholders:
As a product manager, you have to deal with stakeholders. But how do you do it? How do you persuade those that control your resources (people, budget, and systems) that your idea is worth investing in? What if this skill is the difference between a successful product manager and a mediocre one?
Alex McCarthy, Product Manager at Navigate Next, taught how to manage your stakeholders, how to craft your message, how to say “yes” and how to say “no” to senior leaders, and how to get the outcome you want. Influencing stakeholders can change the trajectory of your product – and your career.
Growth: How to (Not) Lose Your Customers in 14 days by Box's Sr. Product ManagerProduct School
In this talk, the Box Sr. Product Manager talked about how to tackle quick wins, and then develop a longer term strategy for onboarding, sales channels, increasing marketshare for mostly enterprise software (can also dip into a bit of consumer).
The key points were:
1) Growth isn't just important for consumer facing software companies - it should be something that every technology company is thinking about from an engagement and revenue perspective.
2) Growth can range from sales channel optimization (both self-serve and enabling reps), marketing campaigns, building experiences for customers to demo your product, onboarding, matching users with the correct tools to get the most value from your company etc.
3) Experiment! Fail fast. Part of finding the best growth strategy is to try things out and A/B test experiences to see what is driving your core metrics.
How to Use Customer Feedback on Your Product by UserVoice CEOProduct School
Increased competition and higher customer expectations are forcing modern product management teams to up their game to keep pace. In this talk Richard White, CEO of UserVoice, talked about how product leaders are leveraging customer feedback, collected across the organization, to inform how they build the best product possible in the shortest amount of time.
How to Lead Product Teams without Authority by former Google PMProduct School
You go to your engineering team with a product plan, and they say "no". The QA team emailed that they won't approve a product launch. The marketing team called: there's nothing captivating about your product and they won't create blog posts to bolster interest. A partner team refuses to build the features you need in order to move forward.
What now?
As a Product Manager, making new, successful products is your responsibility, but you have absolutely no control over your colleagues. How do the best Product Managers get things done without being the boss? In this event, we discussed which strategies make a Product Manager an invaluable member of the team, and which make them ineffective.
Startup vs Corporate Products by Oracle's Director of ProductProduct School
What to expect and not to expect when you are working for a small company vs. a multi-billion dollar company as a Product Manager. All things considered, what will you learn and where will you have more fun doing what you like to do as a Product Manager.
How to Get to Know Your Users by Google's former Product ManagerProduct School
The single most important thing you can do as a Product Manager is to get a solid understanding of your users. Where are they? How many? What are their personas? Why do they currently use your product?
The user/customer is the basis of any business. So, how does one get a deeper understanding of who the user/customer is?
Vikram Chatterji, former Product Manager at Google, talked about how these methods vary based on company size, type (B2B, B2C), and proximity to end users.
How to Find the Right Product Role by Amex Sr. Product ManagerProduct School
Product Management has a wide range of responsibilities that can depend on the company industry, size of the company, and the expectations of the management team. In this talk, Dan Robinson, Sr. Product Manager at American Express, went over what clues to look for when you're searching for a new product management role. We also discussed the intricacies of how product management roles can differ at companies of 5, 50, and 50,000 employees.
Dan talked about what questions to ask during a Product Manager interview, what to look for in responses and how to think about a product role in the greater context of your Product Manager career.
Cloud Elements CEO, Mark Geene's presentation for Startup Founder 101 event. July 9, 2013 at Galvanize Denver, CO. Lean product management principles, Startup Metrics for Pirates, Agile MVP planning and using Pivotal Tracker.
Large vs. Small Company Product Management by StubHub Product ManagerProduct School
In this session Matt Wolf, Product Manager at StubHub, talked about the stages of companies, small company teams, large company teams, key differences in company size, and how to understand the Product Manager role based on company size.
He also discussed the needs of companies at different stages, how your process, expectations, reactions, should be different, and how you should think about your career arc and where you want to be over the long term (and when).
Growth: How to (Not) Lose Your Customers in 14 days by Box's Sr. Product ManagerProduct School
In this talk, the Box Sr. Product Manager talked about how to tackle quick wins, and then develop a longer term strategy for onboarding, sales channels, increasing marketshare for mostly enterprise software (can also dip into a bit of consumer).
The key points were:
1) Growth isn't just important for consumer facing software companies - it should be something that every technology company is thinking about from an engagement and revenue perspective.
2) Growth can range from sales channel optimization (both self-serve and enabling reps), marketing campaigns, building experiences for customers to demo your product, onboarding, matching users with the correct tools to get the most value from your company etc.
3) Experiment! Fail fast. Part of finding the best growth strategy is to try things out and A/B test experiences to see what is driving your core metrics.
How to Use Customer Feedback on Your Product by UserVoice CEOProduct School
Increased competition and higher customer expectations are forcing modern product management teams to up their game to keep pace. In this talk Richard White, CEO of UserVoice, talked about how product leaders are leveraging customer feedback, collected across the organization, to inform how they build the best product possible in the shortest amount of time.
How to Lead Product Teams without Authority by former Google PMProduct School
You go to your engineering team with a product plan, and they say "no". The QA team emailed that they won't approve a product launch. The marketing team called: there's nothing captivating about your product and they won't create blog posts to bolster interest. A partner team refuses to build the features you need in order to move forward.
What now?
As a Product Manager, making new, successful products is your responsibility, but you have absolutely no control over your colleagues. How do the best Product Managers get things done without being the boss? In this event, we discussed which strategies make a Product Manager an invaluable member of the team, and which make them ineffective.
Startup vs Corporate Products by Oracle's Director of ProductProduct School
What to expect and not to expect when you are working for a small company vs. a multi-billion dollar company as a Product Manager. All things considered, what will you learn and where will you have more fun doing what you like to do as a Product Manager.
How to Get to Know Your Users by Google's former Product ManagerProduct School
The single most important thing you can do as a Product Manager is to get a solid understanding of your users. Where are they? How many? What are their personas? Why do they currently use your product?
The user/customer is the basis of any business. So, how does one get a deeper understanding of who the user/customer is?
Vikram Chatterji, former Product Manager at Google, talked about how these methods vary based on company size, type (B2B, B2C), and proximity to end users.
How to Find the Right Product Role by Amex Sr. Product ManagerProduct School
Product Management has a wide range of responsibilities that can depend on the company industry, size of the company, and the expectations of the management team. In this talk, Dan Robinson, Sr. Product Manager at American Express, went over what clues to look for when you're searching for a new product management role. We also discussed the intricacies of how product management roles can differ at companies of 5, 50, and 50,000 employees.
Dan talked about what questions to ask during a Product Manager interview, what to look for in responses and how to think about a product role in the greater context of your Product Manager career.
Cloud Elements CEO, Mark Geene's presentation for Startup Founder 101 event. July 9, 2013 at Galvanize Denver, CO. Lean product management principles, Startup Metrics for Pirates, Agile MVP planning and using Pivotal Tracker.
Large vs. Small Company Product Management by StubHub Product ManagerProduct School
In this session Matt Wolf, Product Manager at StubHub, talked about the stages of companies, small company teams, large company teams, key differences in company size, and how to understand the Product Manager role based on company size.
He also discussed the needs of companies at different stages, how your process, expectations, reactions, should be different, and how you should think about your career arc and where you want to be over the long term (and when).
The Art of Product Management by 23andMe Senior Product ManagerProduct School
Product management is a fascinating and broad area that encompasses vision, strategy, design and execution. This presentation provided an overview of various aspects of product management from understanding the market, the competition, the user, defining the MVP, designing and building the product leading up to successful launch.
Venkatesh Balan, Senior Product Manager at 23andMe, talked about how after the launch, the role of the Product Manager continues in evolving the product, monetizing, growing the users and revenue. Not to mention, the Product Manager also works with various cross-functional teams while using influence, inspiration and soft skills.
Data Driven Growth Hacks with ListenFirst Media's Senior PMProduct School
Ross Sclafani from ListenFirst Media discussed growth hacking, its role in product management and how to use to data drive growth hacking in your organization as Product Manager.
He also talked about what Growth Hacking is and how to interpret Data for Growth Hacking.
How to Build a Product Vision by Spotify Product ManagerProduct School
In this episode, Matt Williams talks about building a product vision and getting stakeholder buy in. He also covers 'managing up' and how to navigate within your organization, whilst fostering an understanding of vision and user empathy with engineers.
Cracking the Product Manager Interview with Gayle McDowellProduct School
In this talk, Gayle McDowell, author of the book "Cracking the PM Interview", taught people how to prepare for Product Manager interviews, what top companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft really look for, and how to tackle the toughest problems.
She talked about how the role of a Product Manager varies across companies, what experience you need, how to make your existing experience translate, what a great Product Manager resume and cover letter look like, and finally, how to master the Product Manager interview questions.
What Are New Product Innovations by Square Sr. Product ManagerProduct School
Jobs To Be Done, JTBD, is a product innovation framework co-developed by Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen. It’s centered around the idea that customers hire and fire products and services to make progress toward life goals. A job to be done. By learning what progress means to your customers, insights can be uncovered that lead to new product innovations.
Intro to Data Analytics with Oscar's Director of ProductProduct School
The Director of Product at Oscar, Vasudev Vadlamudi, went over key types of quantitative analysis that B2C product managers use on the job including: funnels, cohorts, and a/b testing. For each one he looked into when and why they are used, and used examples.
I’m not going to spend any time on Google Analytics.
How healthy is this business?
It’d be great to track metrics like these: 1 MRR, Churn, LTV, acquisition cost 2 Virality, DAU, MAU 3 Average order value, repurchase rate 4 Funnels and conversions
But you don’t have any data yet
Your data is in a constant rate of decay
Your data is messy
Use metrics that measure your biggest problem. Ignore the rest.
Gateway Metrics
When picking metrics, always ask yourself: What’s my biggest constraint right now and which metric will tell me if I’m making progress?
You need to do the right things in the right order.
Gateway #1: Is your idea any good?
Your main constraint: Getting anyone to care about your idea.
Your main metric: Get someone to pay or use your product regularly.
Bad metrics for this gateway: 1 Asking people if they’ll pay 2 AdWords clicks 3 Beta or waiting list signups 4 Traffic
Gateway #2: Is your product good enough?
Your main constraint: Having a product that’s good enough to build a business on.
Your main metric: Ask 500 users the Product/Market Fit Question
What is the P/M Fit Question?
Your goal for the P/M Fit Question: At least 40% of users should say “Very disappointed.” *Sean Ellis and Hiten Shah get credit for this one.
How do you get to the first 500 users/customers? Hustle.
The P/M Fit Question isn’t perfect, verify with a retention metric.
Gateway #3: Can you grow?
Your main constraint: Acquiring customers consistently from at least one channel.
You have plenty of options to choose from: 1 Inbound (Google, Content, Social) 2 Paid (PPC, Affiliates) 3 Virality (Invites, Referrals)
Pick just one to start Work on your channel for at least 3 months. Assume it’ll work and get the resources needed to execute.
Your main metrics: Your main business metric and acquisition funnel.
Main business metrics: 1 SaaS: Monthly Recurring Revenue 2 Ecommerce: Monthly Revenue 3 Consumer Tech: Monthly Active Users
Why not cost per acquisition or lifetime value? You have no idea how much it costs to acquire customers or how much they’ll spend (yet).
Gateway #4: Do you have a stable model?
Your main constraint: In order to keep scaling, you need a stable model for your business.
Your main metrics: Depends entirely on what business model you have.
The SaaS Model
The Ecommerce
The Consumer Tech Model
Find someone in your industry that knows the key benchmarks.
Finally, get serious with data.
If you have a sales team, pile data into your CRM.
If consumer tech, do everything in-house.
Google Analytics plus an internal database will take you far.
Start with constraints, hack together what you need to measure them.
How to get data you really need: 1 One team owns data quality. 2 Hire a data engineer. 3 Clean up and integrate your data. 4 Use customer analytics. 5 Build a Growth Team.
How to Drive Excellence in Product Management by Capital One Product ManagerProduct School
One of the biggest challenges for a Product Manager is how to drive excellence and efficiency in product development. Gaurav Jain from Capital one talked about how to understand some of the basic and core principles of Product Management.
He also discussed the necessity of putting customer’s needs first to drive profitable and successful business. Gaurav shared his experience in driving his teams towards a common goal for success and excellence in product delivery for the end-user.
From Engineering to Product Management by Olapic Product ManagerProduct School
Transitioning from Engineering to Product is not simply "natural." A lot of the products that we use today rely heavily on technology. However, knowing how to build the product is just one of the many important aspects in your new reality. In this talk, Janko Bazhdavela from Olapic went over how to have a successful transition between these two roles.
Main takeaways:
-Use your technical knowledge and expertise to better understand and connect
with your team
-Develop deep user empathy and try to understand all the different points of
view
-Try to understand how you, as the influencer, can help everyone
- Understand that “Why” will matter more to you than “What” and “How”
-How to be an excellent communicator and understand how to talk with different audiences
How to Build a Product Roadmap by eBay Director of ProductProduct School
Sudha Mahajan talked about how to build great roadmaps! Great roadmaps require right trade-offs, right prioritization, strong execution rigger and above all success metrics. A strong roadmap is your channel to success. There is no one size that fits all, but there are certain techniques that can help you get there.
Launching a New Product in Established Company by Microsoft PM DirProduct School
Main Takeaways:
- How you can identify and validate problems to solve and scope a market opportunity
- How to pitch to your internal investors (your GMs & VPs)
- How to take your idea to market and validate product-market fit
Problems PMs Face as Problem Solvers by Microsoft Product LeaderProduct School
Main takeaways:
- What are the possible options to solve a given problem? And how to get the ideas?
- Which one is the best? How to prioritize and drive clarity? For yourself, for your team (basically how to pick from the options in challenge 1)
- How to go about executing it? How to influence without formal authority? Communication and tips on that.
How to Build Software Products by FOX Senior Product ManagerProduct School
What better way to learn about product management than by diving deep and building one together? Product management differs in responsibilities and authority depending on your organization. What's universal is the direct impact Product Managers have with the success of the products you manage.
This presentation showcased one way a product is born to how to manage it afterwards. It also talked about giving an end-to-end perspective that can be applied to products and features you work on in any organization you're a part of.
How to Get a Job as a Product Manager by Airbnb Product LeadProduct School
Curious about what companies are looking for when hiring Product Managers? Companies may have different approaches as to what they place more emphasis on. However, there are some fundamental core values & skill sets that are clearly evaluated when talking to prospective candidates. Angeli Jain from Airbnb talked through some core skill sets a Product Manager is evaluated on and how to assess your own skill set to determine company fit.
Making the Product Strategy Effective by Spotify Sr PMProduct School
Main Takeaways:
-Defining scalable and efficient products
-Developing a culture with a strong ownership
-Creating the buy in among stakeholders and developing a roadmap that addresses the long term value.
Webinar: When and How to Launch a Big Redesign by Typeform Product LeadProduct School
Main Takeaways:
-Be hard on yourself when assessing the opportunity cost of the initiative. A simple rule of thumb for impact: mid-term strategic alignment > UX debt > technical debt.
-Keep the redesign as lean as possible but make sure you bring a few new features on top of it. Create incentives.
-Own the strategy to mitigate change aversion. Good alignment between Product, Marketing, Support, and others is critical for a smooth roll-out.
A/B Testing for New Product Launches by Booking.com Sr PMProduct School
Main takeaways:
-There is no one right way of validating a product, A/B testing is just one of them
-Get your product 'qualitatively' validated before 'quantitatively' validating
-Use holdouts to measure the long term success of your new products, while running A/B test in parallel
Working together: Agile teams, developers, and product managersDanielle Martin
I spoke to students at Ada Developer Academy in Seattle, WA about how product managers and software engineers work together. In the presentation I cover: what's an agile team and how do they work; case studies of real work by my agile product development team; advice about behaviors that create successful product manager and developer working relationships; and other career/life advice for students starting their careers as software engineers.
How to Create the Sound Platform by Sonos' Global Product LeadProduct School
Navigating the world of connected things, voice, and smart homes has become more complex with the rise of voice control and hw getting connected to the internet. Sanford Spivey talked about how Sonos leads with experience & drives to drive seamless experiences between platforms through partnerships. They have been partnering for years in the content space with 80+ content providers on our platform & now expanding that strategic partnership focus to smart homes and voice partners.
Why Big and Small Data Is Important by Google's Product ManagerProduct School
In this talk, Dan McClary, a Product Manager at Google, walked through the importance of using data to drive product decisions, as well as how to quickly pull together an architecture using free tools to help grow a product effort from market analysis to live data capture and data-driven product decisions. We also played a rousing game of Breakout.
The Art of Product Management by 23andMe Senior Product ManagerProduct School
Product management is a fascinating and broad area that encompasses vision, strategy, design and execution. This presentation provided an overview of various aspects of product management from understanding the market, the competition, the user, defining the MVP, designing and building the product leading up to successful launch.
Venkatesh Balan, Senior Product Manager at 23andMe, talked about how after the launch, the role of the Product Manager continues in evolving the product, monetizing, growing the users and revenue. Not to mention, the Product Manager also works with various cross-functional teams while using influence, inspiration and soft skills.
Data Driven Growth Hacks with ListenFirst Media's Senior PMProduct School
Ross Sclafani from ListenFirst Media discussed growth hacking, its role in product management and how to use to data drive growth hacking in your organization as Product Manager.
He also talked about what Growth Hacking is and how to interpret Data for Growth Hacking.
How to Build a Product Vision by Spotify Product ManagerProduct School
In this episode, Matt Williams talks about building a product vision and getting stakeholder buy in. He also covers 'managing up' and how to navigate within your organization, whilst fostering an understanding of vision and user empathy with engineers.
Cracking the Product Manager Interview with Gayle McDowellProduct School
In this talk, Gayle McDowell, author of the book "Cracking the PM Interview", taught people how to prepare for Product Manager interviews, what top companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft really look for, and how to tackle the toughest problems.
She talked about how the role of a Product Manager varies across companies, what experience you need, how to make your existing experience translate, what a great Product Manager resume and cover letter look like, and finally, how to master the Product Manager interview questions.
What Are New Product Innovations by Square Sr. Product ManagerProduct School
Jobs To Be Done, JTBD, is a product innovation framework co-developed by Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen. It’s centered around the idea that customers hire and fire products and services to make progress toward life goals. A job to be done. By learning what progress means to your customers, insights can be uncovered that lead to new product innovations.
Intro to Data Analytics with Oscar's Director of ProductProduct School
The Director of Product at Oscar, Vasudev Vadlamudi, went over key types of quantitative analysis that B2C product managers use on the job including: funnels, cohorts, and a/b testing. For each one he looked into when and why they are used, and used examples.
I’m not going to spend any time on Google Analytics.
How healthy is this business?
It’d be great to track metrics like these: 1 MRR, Churn, LTV, acquisition cost 2 Virality, DAU, MAU 3 Average order value, repurchase rate 4 Funnels and conversions
But you don’t have any data yet
Your data is in a constant rate of decay
Your data is messy
Use metrics that measure your biggest problem. Ignore the rest.
Gateway Metrics
When picking metrics, always ask yourself: What’s my biggest constraint right now and which metric will tell me if I’m making progress?
You need to do the right things in the right order.
Gateway #1: Is your idea any good?
Your main constraint: Getting anyone to care about your idea.
Your main metric: Get someone to pay or use your product regularly.
Bad metrics for this gateway: 1 Asking people if they’ll pay 2 AdWords clicks 3 Beta or waiting list signups 4 Traffic
Gateway #2: Is your product good enough?
Your main constraint: Having a product that’s good enough to build a business on.
Your main metric: Ask 500 users the Product/Market Fit Question
What is the P/M Fit Question?
Your goal for the P/M Fit Question: At least 40% of users should say “Very disappointed.” *Sean Ellis and Hiten Shah get credit for this one.
How do you get to the first 500 users/customers? Hustle.
The P/M Fit Question isn’t perfect, verify with a retention metric.
Gateway #3: Can you grow?
Your main constraint: Acquiring customers consistently from at least one channel.
You have plenty of options to choose from: 1 Inbound (Google, Content, Social) 2 Paid (PPC, Affiliates) 3 Virality (Invites, Referrals)
Pick just one to start Work on your channel for at least 3 months. Assume it’ll work and get the resources needed to execute.
Your main metrics: Your main business metric and acquisition funnel.
Main business metrics: 1 SaaS: Monthly Recurring Revenue 2 Ecommerce: Monthly Revenue 3 Consumer Tech: Monthly Active Users
Why not cost per acquisition or lifetime value? You have no idea how much it costs to acquire customers or how much they’ll spend (yet).
Gateway #4: Do you have a stable model?
Your main constraint: In order to keep scaling, you need a stable model for your business.
Your main metrics: Depends entirely on what business model you have.
The SaaS Model
The Ecommerce
The Consumer Tech Model
Find someone in your industry that knows the key benchmarks.
Finally, get serious with data.
If you have a sales team, pile data into your CRM.
If consumer tech, do everything in-house.
Google Analytics plus an internal database will take you far.
Start with constraints, hack together what you need to measure them.
How to get data you really need: 1 One team owns data quality. 2 Hire a data engineer. 3 Clean up and integrate your data. 4 Use customer analytics. 5 Build a Growth Team.
How to Drive Excellence in Product Management by Capital One Product ManagerProduct School
One of the biggest challenges for a Product Manager is how to drive excellence and efficiency in product development. Gaurav Jain from Capital one talked about how to understand some of the basic and core principles of Product Management.
He also discussed the necessity of putting customer’s needs first to drive profitable and successful business. Gaurav shared his experience in driving his teams towards a common goal for success and excellence in product delivery for the end-user.
From Engineering to Product Management by Olapic Product ManagerProduct School
Transitioning from Engineering to Product is not simply "natural." A lot of the products that we use today rely heavily on technology. However, knowing how to build the product is just one of the many important aspects in your new reality. In this talk, Janko Bazhdavela from Olapic went over how to have a successful transition between these two roles.
Main takeaways:
-Use your technical knowledge and expertise to better understand and connect
with your team
-Develop deep user empathy and try to understand all the different points of
view
-Try to understand how you, as the influencer, can help everyone
- Understand that “Why” will matter more to you than “What” and “How”
-How to be an excellent communicator and understand how to talk with different audiences
How to Build a Product Roadmap by eBay Director of ProductProduct School
Sudha Mahajan talked about how to build great roadmaps! Great roadmaps require right trade-offs, right prioritization, strong execution rigger and above all success metrics. A strong roadmap is your channel to success. There is no one size that fits all, but there are certain techniques that can help you get there.
Launching a New Product in Established Company by Microsoft PM DirProduct School
Main Takeaways:
- How you can identify and validate problems to solve and scope a market opportunity
- How to pitch to your internal investors (your GMs & VPs)
- How to take your idea to market and validate product-market fit
Problems PMs Face as Problem Solvers by Microsoft Product LeaderProduct School
Main takeaways:
- What are the possible options to solve a given problem? And how to get the ideas?
- Which one is the best? How to prioritize and drive clarity? For yourself, for your team (basically how to pick from the options in challenge 1)
- How to go about executing it? How to influence without formal authority? Communication and tips on that.
How to Build Software Products by FOX Senior Product ManagerProduct School
What better way to learn about product management than by diving deep and building one together? Product management differs in responsibilities and authority depending on your organization. What's universal is the direct impact Product Managers have with the success of the products you manage.
This presentation showcased one way a product is born to how to manage it afterwards. It also talked about giving an end-to-end perspective that can be applied to products and features you work on in any organization you're a part of.
How to Get a Job as a Product Manager by Airbnb Product LeadProduct School
Curious about what companies are looking for when hiring Product Managers? Companies may have different approaches as to what they place more emphasis on. However, there are some fundamental core values & skill sets that are clearly evaluated when talking to prospective candidates. Angeli Jain from Airbnb talked through some core skill sets a Product Manager is evaluated on and how to assess your own skill set to determine company fit.
Making the Product Strategy Effective by Spotify Sr PMProduct School
Main Takeaways:
-Defining scalable and efficient products
-Developing a culture with a strong ownership
-Creating the buy in among stakeholders and developing a roadmap that addresses the long term value.
Webinar: When and How to Launch a Big Redesign by Typeform Product LeadProduct School
Main Takeaways:
-Be hard on yourself when assessing the opportunity cost of the initiative. A simple rule of thumb for impact: mid-term strategic alignment > UX debt > technical debt.
-Keep the redesign as lean as possible but make sure you bring a few new features on top of it. Create incentives.
-Own the strategy to mitigate change aversion. Good alignment between Product, Marketing, Support, and others is critical for a smooth roll-out.
A/B Testing for New Product Launches by Booking.com Sr PMProduct School
Main takeaways:
-There is no one right way of validating a product, A/B testing is just one of them
-Get your product 'qualitatively' validated before 'quantitatively' validating
-Use holdouts to measure the long term success of your new products, while running A/B test in parallel
Working together: Agile teams, developers, and product managersDanielle Martin
I spoke to students at Ada Developer Academy in Seattle, WA about how product managers and software engineers work together. In the presentation I cover: what's an agile team and how do they work; case studies of real work by my agile product development team; advice about behaviors that create successful product manager and developer working relationships; and other career/life advice for students starting their careers as software engineers.
How to Create the Sound Platform by Sonos' Global Product LeadProduct School
Navigating the world of connected things, voice, and smart homes has become more complex with the rise of voice control and hw getting connected to the internet. Sanford Spivey talked about how Sonos leads with experience & drives to drive seamless experiences between platforms through partnerships. They have been partnering for years in the content space with 80+ content providers on our platform & now expanding that strategic partnership focus to smart homes and voice partners.
Why Big and Small Data Is Important by Google's Product ManagerProduct School
In this talk, Dan McClary, a Product Manager at Google, walked through the importance of using data to drive product decisions, as well as how to quickly pull together an architecture using free tools to help grow a product effort from market analysis to live data capture and data-driven product decisions. We also played a rousing game of Breakout.
How to Become a Versatile Product Manager by Google's PMProduct School
The pace of change in technology products is accelerating. As you build out your Swiss army knife of Product Manager skills, one key asset is an ability to be able to adapt to different types of products. Large companies look to hire generalist product managers who can navigate across product areas with ease. Some startups pivot from focusing on the consumer to becoming a B2B product. Are you prepared to be the versatile Product Manager that can be effective, no matter what?
In this session, Siddharth Bhai from Google took a look at three types of products, and discussed their distinct needs and strategies to succeed as a Product Manager in each:
Enterprise (Eg. Infrastructure/Deployment/IT)
Consumer (Eg. Apps/Websites)
Business (Eg. Sales/Marketing/Finance)
Solving Problems by Using Products with Google's Product ManagerProduct School
People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole! This is a profound insight. Customers don't want products, they want solutions to their problems. All great products are built around profound insights. In this talk Rakesh Goyal shared some examples of successful products and the foundational insight or ‘secret’ as Peter Thiel would like to call it on which they were built.
How to Transition from Engineering to Product by LinkedIn's PMProduct School
Product managers are sometimes reviled and other times revered. We went over the differences between the roles and what to expect. We discussed how to shift your thinking and start working like a product manager, and how to shift your mindset and learn to think about "why" instead of just "what".
Innovation Fueled by Immersive Experiences by Pendo.io's Product ManagerProduct School
The power of applying insights from immersive experiences in order to fuel innovation — or in the case of Disney — creativity, vision, and brilliant story-telling. Insights are driven by product leaders who are customer-backed & data driven.
Big Companies vs. Startups by Google's former Product ManagerProduct School
Product Manager approaches things differently depending on the project, team and size of the company. Shaun Seo talked about the differences in Product Management approaches at big and established companies like Google and GoDaddy, and small startups. He discussed how you can define your role and responsibilities, understand the required granularity of insights and choose the right frameworks.
Measure Your Way to Success by Sephora's former Dir. of ProductProduct School
Product management is about creating change. Metrics are the guideposts that help us ensure that the changes we make are leading to the results we want. They let us forecast, provide early warning signals, and create incentives for action.
In this talk Meghan Cochran talked about designing good metrics, gaining alignment among a broad range of stakeholders, and communicating progress effectively. She discussed the trade-offs of looking at rates & ratios vs absolute numbers, and talked about funnels, cohorts, and other fascinating and exciting measures of success.
5 Steps for Product Management Success by Stash Product ManagerProduct School
The path to software product management is varied and non-linear, but the skills needed to build successful products are clear. In this conversation, MaryAlexa Divver, Product Manager at Stash, talked about her journey into product management and what it takes to make the jump from big corporate to hyper-growth startup. She discussed why decision-making goes hand and hand with data and how to harness networking to get your dream product management job.
How to Disrupt Digital Product Cultures by LearnVest VP of ProductProduct School
A big part of product management success is bringing various cultures together from people, process, and innovation. Vivek Bedi from LearnVest hosted the product and technology digital teams from Northwestern Mutual and LearnVest as they discussed over the past two years how they have brought two cultures together to come up with a bold, brave, yet balanced "third" culture.
The new culture is one of taking risks, being ok with failing, and focused on innovation while keeping focus on being at the center of clients' financial lives.
How to Build Products for the Blind by Sidewalk Labs' EngineerProduct School
Neha Rathi talked about a few projects she worked on for the visually impaired. The first was in collaboration with TechBridgeWorld, an organization that facilitated the implementation of accessible technologies for developing communities. The second was during her time at Google Maps.
How to Design Inclusive Products by Google's Sr. Product ManagerProduct School
Product managers have to be user centric to build great products, but many Product Managers stop short and focus only on generic use cases. A great product that reaches the masses needs to be inclusive of the many different types of users that might use it.
Laura Holmes from Google talked about how to build inclusive products and discussed how biases can impact product design and the many tools for counteracting bias as you build the next unicorn.
Product Management Ethics in A.I. by Yammer's former Dir. of ProductProduct School
From maximizing the crave-ability of food additives to notification addiction, Product Managers have a profound impact on society. In the not too distant future, a number of those Product decisions will be delivered by artificial intelligence. In this talk, we discussed ethical lessons from the history of Product Management and how we can learn from them to build ethical AI.
Former Director of Product at Yammer also talked about how to understand data quality, biases, and potential impacts, and learn what your self-driving car will do when it encounters The Trolley Problem.
How to Pick the Price for Your Product by Amazon Product ManagerProduct School
Pricing is one of the most important skills a Product Manager needs to have. Whether it be pricing a a new product, service launch, pricing an upgrade or just thinking about price cuts to stay competitive. We talked about how top firms think about pricing, various pricing strategies, architecture and implementation.
Aditya Vikram, Product Manager at Amazon discussed the importance of pricing, pricing strategies, and price setting and architecture.
Product Management For Free-to-Play Games w/ AC&A's Senior PMProduct School
The presentation covered the principles of product management for free-to-play games. Games have taken a live product mentality in the last few years, and PM's need to be able to combine design, data, and marketing to drive important KPI's.
Bullet points:
- What the important revenue and retention KPIs for games are
- How to decide what new features to add to gaming products
- What a successful A/B testing looks like in the gaming space
- Ad supported games
- Case studies: examples of successful feature releases in the gaming industry
Experimentation Concepts & How to Leverage Them with Jet.com's PMProduct School
Experimentation, it seems easy but it's difficult to execute properly. We started from the beginning with some basic concepts, what testing looks like in action, and how you can utilize testing to get an early indication of what kind of impact a feature will make on your product.
MaryKate Guidry, the Associate Product Manager for Experimentation at Jet.com, talked about the basic concepts of experimentation, what does success look like, how to best leverage experimentation and how to engage with your resources.
Customer to Product Idea Iteration by Amazon's Product ManagerProduct School
In this talk, Akshay Kerur from Amazon explored working backwards from the concept/customer to an initial product idea.
Main takeaways:
1. Why it's so important to put your product on paper.
2. Questions you need to know and answer about a product prior to any engineering commitment.
3. Ratifying your product idea through proper customer and internal stakeholder identification.
Highest quality code in your SaaS project. Why should you care about it as a ...The Codest
We are launching a SaaS report dedicated to the whole SaaS market.
It is a useful pill of knowledge for the non-technical founders who are struggling with many challenges, especially the technological ones. In the report, we cover the specific problems/dilemmas such as:
- Is it worth making SaaS start-up if you are a non-technical founder?
- What are the biggest challenges to a non-technical founder?
- MVP as the most popular way to deliver product time to market
- Useful tips on how to build a SaaS product in 6 simple steps
Check out the report and make sure to eliminate common mistakes that can hurt your business. Are you a non-technical founder? Don’t worry!
In the short tutorial, you will learn how to successfully build a SaaS product with no programming skills.
Michigan Marketing Minds - September 9, 2014 - Expressing Thought Leadership:...AnnArborSPARK
The Three Keys to Modern Marketing: Content, Content, Content...
Panelists will tell how their companies’ innovative content marketing strategies have helped them:
-establish thought leadership within their industries,
-get found by the right kinds of customers,
-build strong brands that stand apart from the competition,
-increase preference among customers ready to buy.
From Product Vision to Story Map - Lean / Agile Product shapingJérôme Kehrli
A lot of Software Engineering projects fail for a lack of shared vision due to poor communication among people involved in the project.
A sound maintenance of the product backlog can only be achieved if all the people have a good understanding of what they have to do (common vision).
Roman Pichler, in a post originally written in Jul 16 2012, has proposed a really interesting approach: use various canvas to create and share product vision and product backlog creation and refinement.
This presentation is a drive through these various boards and canvas that should be designed in prior to any product development: the Product Vision, the Lean Canvas, The Product Definition and the Story Map.
Why Product-Led Growth is the most effective GTM strategyMickey Alon
Product-led growth is a strategy that relies on features and usage as primary drivers for customer acquisition, retention and expansion. Mastering growth is an iterative process that involves measurements, user engagements and experimentation.
Session materials from interactive workshop on business hackathons. Business Hackathons are immersive, dynamic events that bring together business and technology to imagine, design and build innovative solutions.
I have been asked this many times - What does a Product Manager do? How to be a successful PM? How should the team be structured? Here's an attempt from a recent talk that I gave on Product Management.
Marketing 3.0: Creating a Faster Path to Innovation and ResultsSteve Drake
Four panelists representing 124+ associations discuss 5 problems and 5 solutions for 3.0 marketing. They are presenting this information at the 2014 ASAE Great Ideas Conference.
Product Roadmaps - Tips on how to create and manage roadmapsMarc Abraham
This presentation is focused on two areas with respect to product roadmaps. Firstly, a roadmap is a not a loose collection of timings and features. Secondly, it is key to define a product vision, goals and strategy before creating a roadmap.
Agile marketing may take different forms across various applications; still, any organization can adopt the practice. Here are six critical components to making that happen. Case study included.
Building new products - sundar rajan - introduction (part 1)Sundar Rajan
In this talk, we will understand the challenges & risks associated with new product development. We will also learn the concept of a discovery process to minimize these risks in a systematic way.
During the talk we will build a fictious product using the discovery process to understand this methodology.
Product Management 101: Techniques for SuccessMatterport
This is a snapshot from a living document. To see the current document, please go to https://goo.gl/yFFrml.
Topics covered include:
- Resources
- General Overview
- The Role of Product Management
- Characteristics of Great Project and Product Managers
- Problem Space and Solution Space
- Customer Personas
- User Stories
- Product Documentation
- Agile Product Development
- Succeeding with Agile from The Lean Playbook
- Analytics, Customer Engagement, & Monetization
- Pricing Strategies
- Overall Leadership and Organizational Development
- Final Guidelines and Recommendations
Webinar How PMs Use AI to 10X Their Productivity by Product School EiR.pdfProduct School
Explore AI tools hands-on and smoothly integrate them into your work routine. This practical experience is here to empower you, offering insights into the mindset of successful Product Managers. Learn the skills to become a more effective Product Manager.
Main Takeaways:
Hands-On AI Integration:
Learn practical strategies for integrating AI tools into your workflow effectively.
Mindset Insights for Success:
Gain valuable insights into the mindset of successful Product Managers, unlocking the secrets to their achievements.
Skill Empowerment for Growth:
Acquire essential skills that empower your evolution toward becoming a more effective and impactful Product Manager.
Webinar: Using GenAI for Increasing Productivity in PM by Amazon PM LeaderProduct School
In this webinar, you will learn how AI can take work off your plate, allowing you to focus on deep thinking or critical work. Cut out the drudge work in Product Management and get more out of your day.
Learnings:
Improve workflows that are high frequency - "manual tasks"
Increase the quality of output that has high importance - "brainy tasks"
Put GenAI to work today
Unlocking High-Performance Product Teams by former Meta Global PMMProduct School
Main Takeaways:
- High-Performing Team Dynamics: You’ll gain insights into fostering high-performance teamwork.
- Unveiling Team Personas: You’ll learn about different personas in the team and how to foster these differences.
- Decoding the Team Needs x Productivity Equation: You’ll learn about different team needs and how they correlate with engagement and productivity.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
Let's dive deeper into the world of ODC! Ricardo Alves (OutSystems) will join us to tell all about the new Data Fabric. After that, Sezen de Bruijn (OutSystems) will get into the details on how to best design a sturdy architecture within ODC.
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical FuturesBhaskar Mitra
The field of Information retrieval (IR) is currently undergoing a transformative shift, at least partly due to the emerging applications of generative AI to information access. In this talk, we will deliberate on the sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access. We will argue that there is both a critical necessity and an exciting opportunity for the IR community to re-center our research agendas on societal needs while dismantling the artificial separation between the work on fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in IR and the rest of IR research. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as democratic theory and critical theory, and should be co-developed with social science scholars, legal scholars, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others.
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...
How to Improve Managing Stakeholders by Navigate Next Product Manager
1. How to Improve Managing Stakeholders by
Navigate Next Product Manager
www.productschool.com
2. 5 6 Practical Tipsto Improve
Managing Stakeholders
(added one thanks to Robert!)
Product School
10/26/17
3. About Me
Breadth of experience
•
Product management, software, marketing
and sales roles
Early-stage startups to global publicly-traded
companies.
Built product management teams for
hardware, software and services.
•
•
•
Product School Slack: @alexmc
Most recently VP of Product Management at• Email: alex.mccarthy@navigatenext.com
American Innovations (IoT and compliance
software).
Founded Navigate Next to help leaders make
smarter transitions to jobs where they are
passionate and engaged.
•
Product School 26 OCT 2017 2
15. 6 OCT 2017 14
Conclusion
• Stakeholder management is
critical to your career…
• …and your products’ success
• Stakeholder management is
easier if you follow several
basic tips
• Focused communication and
transparency turn your
stakeholders into champions
Product School Slack: @alexmc
Email:
alex.mccarthy@navigatenext.com
Product School 2
16. Part-time Product Management Courses in
San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles
and New York
www.productschool.com