The document outlines key learnings and insights gathered from various product management experiences, workshops, and conferences attended in 2015 and early 2016. It highlights the importance of user research, collaboration, strategic planning, and understanding customer journeys in developing successful products and services. Additionally, it emphasizes the relevance of continuous evaluation, cognitive biases, and the integration of technology in shaping user experiences.

1. LESSONS FROM
2015
PRODUCT CITIES RANDOMUSER EXPERIENCE

2. FIND THE CITY
In Jan 2015, I started working on an app that helps people find
the right city for them
Had 20+ informal user interviews, mapped the stakeholders in the
ecosystem around the problem, charted the (provisional) customer
journey map etc.

3. MAIN LESSONS-
● User research can uncover new problems that are much more
important for your target users
Examples:
● Onboarding versus discovery, when it comes to moving to a new city
● Most of the people moving to a new city currently move through a job
opportunity
● In most of the couples moving to a new city, the partner that doesn't
move with the new job opportunity makes a compromise professionally

4. MAIN LESSONS-
● With the accelerated growth of digital nomadism, Find The City or
similar initiatives will probably be more relevant in 1-2 years, after
there is a big enough critical mass of digital nomads
● There's no problem in putting cool projects on hold and reactivate
them when their estimated traction is way better than the present

5. Inspired by Google Ventures, ran a Design Sprint with the Mac product
team
The Design Sprint is a 5-day process for answering critical business
questions through design, prototyping and testing with customers
BITDEFENDER:
Design Sprint

6. Day 1: Unpack
Day 2: Sketch
Day 3: Decide
Day 4: Prototype
Day 5: Test with customers
BITDEFENDER:
Design Sprint

7. MAIN LESSONS-
● Involving the right people at the right time in the process is an art
● High fidelity prototype usually takes more than estimated
● It's ok to validate with multiple batch of users; Refine validation after
each batch of users

8. P&G SESSION:
Prototyping
Was invited to share insights on
Prototyping during an internal P&G
Leadership Festival
Presented with an UX friend from Adobe

9. MAIN LESSONS-
● Adobe's Kickbox program is a great example to be shared with all the
big companies out there: with their executives and intrapreneurs
● There are really lots of concepts and practices from user experience
and product management that can be applied to internal processes &
services. All intrapreneurs would benefit from basic UX & product
management training

10. BITDEFENDER:
Beta Program
Coordinated Bitdefender’s most
complex beta program so far:
Beta testing for the Windows,
Mac, Android main products and
the new Bitdefender Central
platform

11. MAIN LESSONS-
● In a project with lots of stakeholders involved, it’s useful to actually
have a list of all stakeholders involved and, for each of them: key
points of interaction, communication to be sent, milestones,
escalation points
● Defining the profile of the beta tester and targeting it on social media
is fun
● Responding to beta feedback is a great exercise for a Product
Manager

12. PRODUCT TANK LONDON:
Using analytics as a PM
Attended one of the monthly Product meetup in London
300+ Product people
Speakers from King, Prezi, Linkdex

13. MAIN LESSONS-
● Find the human behaviour and emotions driving each metric
● Avoid metrics porn = watching a deluge of data that makes you feel
good and appeals your ego. Focus on what will prompt you to do things
differently as a result
● From Jono Alderson’s preso: The HEART metrics framework
Happiness, Engagement, Activation, Retention, Task Success
● King optimizes engagement in each Candy Crush level through heavy
multivariate testing

14. MIND THE PRODUCT
Attended in London the biggest Product
conference in Europe
1000+ Product people
Represented the Product community in Romania

15. MAIN LESSONS-
● Dana Chisnell: Every government service is a product. New age govt IT
infrastructure: "Break big stuff into smaller components, APIs, reusable
components, efficiency across agencies at smaller costs".
● Dave Coplin: Context is going to be king - where you are, how you feel,
what you do - all is important; great personalization to be expected.
● Ken Norton: If you can identify all the steps to get to the end, it's not a
10x idea + If you aim for 10x, you have to think about the problem
completely different.

16. MAIN LESSONS-
● Nilan Peiris: How are we inspiring advocacy in our customers? The
product is not enough. They need stories to talk about.
● Jared Spool: Put in roadmaps customer problems to address in the
next period, not features (solutions) to build.
● Shiva Rajaraman: See how people use / hack your product and
embrace it. Your country is not your world, so look outside your
country. Mentorship is key in product. Reach out to a mentor or be a
mentor.

17. MAIN LESSONS-
● Product Managers around the
globe share very similar challenges
(discussed especially with peers
from Product Tank Valencia &
Helsinki in 2015)

18. PRODUCT TANK:
Product Strategy
Monthly meetup of the local Product
community
This edition focused on Strategy
70+ Product people
Speakers from 2Parale, Avangate,
Hootsuite, Zitec

19. MAIN LESSONS-
● Vladimir Oane compared business strategy and military strategy
Summarized in this article
● Strategy as “a specific way to win”
● “If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.”
● Knowing the playground (market) through reverse engineering the
competitor’s strategies.

20. HOW TO WEB:
Product Metrics
How To Web is a cool tech innovation
conference for South Eastern Europe
Moderated the Product Metrics panel
Speakers from Prezi, Eventbrite,
MindTheProduct and Hootsuite

21. MAIN LESSONS-
● Is this metric relevant for the product/business/stage that I am in?
● Different metrics can be used as arguments for different stakeholders
● Getting the data and tracking the metrics are useless if no product
decisions are made based on them

22. PRODUCT TANK:
Product Launches
Monthly meetup of the local Product
community
This edition focused on
Product Launches
Mix of Product, Marketing, PR, Tech
and Startup people at the meetup

23. MAIN LESSONS-
● Timing: When is the right market window? Take into account big
events; Benefit from the launches of the competitors and piggyback
from your differentiation (example: Apple Watch and Vector Watch)
● Pricing: Test pricing before launch; launch with simple pricing plan;
price skimming strategy
● Organizational readiness: are Sales, Support, Tech teams ready for the
launch?

24. VODAFONE:
Mobile for Good
Mobile for Good conference organized by the Vodafone Foundation
Discovered some really cool projects

25. DISCOVERED-
● Beacons that can help blind people recognize the next bus
● Glucometer and app that can help people with diabetes manage easily
their daily medication
● Phones with panic buttons for the elderly, for receiving immediate
medical assistance
● Volunteers that are notified of nearby accidents and can provide first
aid

26. PRODUCT TANK:
Intro to Behavioral Economics
Workshop on Behavioral Economics,
held by a trainer from the Center for
Behavioral Studies during a Product
Tank meetup
Behavioral Economics studies the
effects of the psychological factors on
the economic decisions a person makes

27. MAIN LESSONS-
● Must be aware of the cognitive biases in product teams
● Choice architecture is something to explore in depth
● Defaults matter: “When we don't know what we want, we are guided by
the environment"
● The MINDSPACE framework: Messenger; Incentives; Norms; Defaults;
Salience; Priming; Affect; Commitments; Ego

28. MENTORING:
MVP Academy, TechHub Open Hours,
Innovation Labs
MVP Academy is a local pre-acceleration
program for tech startups
TechHub Open Hours is a local mentorship
program for tech startups
Innovation Labs is a local pre-acceleration
program for student teams

29. MAIN LESSONS-
● A prerequisite of building a great product is to understand well the
problem that you are solving
● It's useful to measure a baseline of the product metrics before making
interventions like A/B tests, new features, growth hacks etc
● Inexperienced product teams have the tendency to validate their
product with their friends & family only

30. OTHER PRO BONO PROJECTS:
RestartEdu Platform, Mellow,
Alternative University app
RestartEdu platform
RestartEdu is the Romanian community of innovators in education.
The goal of the RestartEdu platform is to become a 'one stop shop'
for both formal and informal educational projects in Romania.
Contribution to clarify the scope, prioritization & wireframes for the
MVP.
Alternative University app
App for onboarding new students of the Alternative University.
Contribution in clarifying the scope, prioritization & wireframes for
the MVP.
Mellow is a new premium honey brand.
Minor contribution in packaging design.

31. MAIN LESSONS-
● Clarity in scope with all the stakeholders is critical when starting such
projects; involve the development team as soon as possible
● Quality of work and keeping commitments are equally important in pro
bono work as they are in paid projects
● In side projects that I'm not driving, it's ok to adapt to the pace of the
teams

32. MICRO INTERACTIONS
Moments in the interaction with a product or service
that create user delight.
Held a presentation about the topic at a local Product meetup and
separately for my colleagues at Bitdefender. Created also this mindmap

33. MAIN LESSONS-
● Tools for creating a unique personality for your product or service
● Reverse engineering micro interactions of extraordinary products is
a great learning tool for a product manager or user experience
designer. The Little Big Details blog also helps
● Food for thought: what are your personal 'micro interactions' with
other people? What are the 'micro interactions' of your organization
with your customers?

34. BITDEFENDER:
User Research
Did a series of user research, both quantitative & qualitative
Goal: understand the needs and context of multi-device owners

35. MAIN LESSONS-
Quantitative:
● Extremely important in designing any survey is to start from the
learning objectives. Then, find the best, unbiased etc. questions to
address the learning objectives
● Sample size can be easily calculated with tools like this
Qualitative:
● Interesting to hear from our users what was the path they took to get
our product & previous solutions they had. It’s not always what you
expect
● Setting remote user interviews is a real hassle. Delegate when possible

36. PRODUCT TANK:
User Research
Organized the monthly meetup of the local Product community that
focused on User Research
Speakers from Adobe & Hootsuite

37. MAIN LESSONS-
● Critical: list all your relevant assumptions before starting user research
● Face to face user interviews have the added benefits of non-verbal
language
● Contextual insights are important - visit an user in his own environment
when possible
● Listen to the user instead of defending or selling your product

38. ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSITY INCUBATOR:
Customer Journey Mapping
Workshop on customer journey
mapping for the businesses in the AU
Incubator
Wrote this brief article on Customer
Journeys

39. ● Great tools (e.g. customer journey maps) can be presented in 10
minutes. The experience of practicing using the tool matters in a
workshop
● Customer Journey Maps can uncover what entrepreneurs actually know
about how their clients discover, try, buy etc. their product
● Identifying current highs and lows on a customer journey can help
prioritize the roadmap
MAIN LESSONS-

40. UX Bucharest
The first User Experience conference in Romania
250+ participants

41. From: “Integrated Customer Experience Design” by Erik Roscam Abbing
● Understand the context
For example: when they seek a drill, people want to buy a hole. In that hole
they want to insert a nail, on which they might want to hang a family photo,
which evokes pleasant memories
The true art is to make the connection between the hole and the pleasant
memories
MAIN LESSONS-

42. From: “Magical UX and The Internet of Things” by Josh Clark
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
–Arthur C. Clarke
● What if we bring some wonder into our lives with our advanced technology?
Technology should amplify our humanity.
● "Interaction at the moment of inspiration". Technology should be invisible for
most of the time and emerge when needed to help us get the outcomes we
want.
MAIN LESSONS-

43. UX MEETUP:
Thoughts on Identity and User Experience
Local meetup of the UX people
One of the speakers was Cristian ‘Kit’
Paul - Brandient, leading branding
agency in Romania

44. ● What if logos had more functionality than linking to the website?
● What if we had responsive logos?
Logos that respond to the context of the user,
hinting a certain status or recommended action
● Branding is part of the user experience.
As designers, we should take this more into account
MAIN LESSONS-

45. LONDON:
Museum of Brands
The Museum of Brands,
Packaging, and Advertising has
a collection of over 12,000
items dating as back as far as
the early 1800s.
It features cool products such
as the first Mars Bars and Kit
Kats from the 1930s.

46. MAIN LESSONS-
Products from different decades reflect where the attention of the
society has been.
Thus, if we can predict where the attention of our current society
will go, we can create the next generation of successful products.

47. MILANO:
World Expo
Giant exposition on technology, innovation,
culture, traditions and creativity and how
they relate to food and diet.
Principal focus on the right to healthy,
secure and sufficient food for all the world’s
inhabitants.
145 participating countries

48. As one of the main goals of the expo
was to convey lots of information in
an attractive fashion, this visit was a
masterclass in great infographics.
Digital vs. Physical
Conventional vs. Unconventional
Interactive vs. Static
Giant vs Miniature
MAIN LESSONS-

49. VALENCIA
This visit helped shape my vision of
cities as really big products and
citizens as users.
New question: “What are the specific
features of a city?”
In Valencia, one specific feature is the Turia
river bed gardens, which stretch for almost
9 kilometers through the city

50. The City of Arts and Sciences hosted
the Pixar 25 Anniversary exhibit.
Discovered extraordinary storyboards
and this cool zoetrope.
Was inspired by the entire process of
creating an animation.
Bonus-

51. ASPEN:
Creative Cities
Conference on city challenges
and creative solutions
Case study: Washington D.C.
Speaker: Uwe Brandes

52. New questions:
● As we can begin to better measure how cities perform,
do they do the things we want them to do?
● What is the good life in this new context?
Common challenges of modern cities:
Demographics, people getting older + lack of knowledge workers
Climate change, rising seas
Energy mng and security + water mng
Mng urban infrastructure, financed and maintained
Importance of capital markets, investment to your city
MAIN LESSONS-
Competition for capital globally
Understanding risk in cities
Lots of data that we never had before
Cities plus nature, nature in cities
City sustainability, from inside and outside city

53. Other considerations:
● Process of scenario planning, iterative, multiple options - to be applied also in
city planning
● Transportation - integrated systems, mobility systems, quality of the experience,
otherwise private companies will create them. Example: Uber
● What is the effect of the Internet to the experience of the city?
○ Example: impact in the commerce of the city and where you go to shop
● To take into account: Street design + Culture of the area
MAIN LESSONS-

54. WEEKLY REVIEW & PLANNING
1 hour weekly, on Sunday afternoon
Going through personal projects,
recurring weekly activities (e.g. walking the dog, grocery shopping),
social, health, entertainment activities, money planning etc.

55. ● The single most impactful new habit in 2015
● Provides clarity & balance, better follow-up, progress on multiple
projects
● Contributes to designing great weeks (with both must haves and
delighters)
MAIN LESSONS-

56. HEARTHSTONE
GAME OF THRONES LCG
Mmm… addictive card games

57. ● Value is the strength of your cards
● Tempo is how many cards you have in play
Comparing resources in games (cards) and personal resources in real
life (skills, knowledge, attitude, network, money, reputation etc.):
Value translates to personal development and
Tempo translates to the ratio of personal resources that are used
to generate actual results in reality
MAIN LESSONS-

58. CAESAR Forum
Forum organized by the CAESAR Foundation
12 groups of expertise to work on public policies for 12 areas
Contributed to the Entrepreneurship & IT group

59. ● There is a need for more competent people in the ‘system’
● Transparency is core to minimize corruption. Minimizing corruption
is core to have an efficient system
● There is a need for way more civically engaged professionals in our
society
● Key question: "what can I as a citizen do for a better society?"
MAIN LESSONS-

60. 2016
GAME ON
ENTREPRENEURSHIP CIVICS RANDOMEDUCATION