This document summarizes key themes from a product management festival in 3 points: 1) Products should connect emotionally with customers by addressing their problems and providing curated, personalized content. 2) Successful teams focus on understanding the user perspective, building prototypes quickly to test ideas, and giving autonomy to frontline teams. 3) Companies can differentiate themselves by focusing on premium experiences over price, emotional connections over functionality, niche markets over broad appeals, and exclusive, curated content over open platforms.

1. ProductManagement
Festival2015

2. KeyThemes
Humanise your product, ensure it connects
emotionally with the customer
Make sure you seek out and understand the user’s
problems and fix these
Curated content is delicious, and machine
learning can help it scale

3. QuotePack
"Do something the big guys don't care about and
really understand that something"
- The guy from the consultancy advising mid-sized
companies who are squashed between startups and the
googles
“Look for the 10x not the 10%,
...to get the 10x you need to create new products not look inside
existing products"
- (I can’t source this, but I did see it)
"You never have complete information
And there is too much of it anyway
Make the call and make it happen"
- Xing, The European LinkedIn (!!)
"Build digital services so good people
prefer to use them"
- The guy from the ministry of justice
“…in a highly regulated space you can’t really go with a traditional buggy
MVP, you need to scope stuff down and sweat the detail"
- The guy from the Fintech startup
“Relish the Random"
- The guy from Spotify?
"Victory is damn hard and rare"
- Xing again

4. Workinginteamsandwithothers
Look at the issue from the other
perspective, try to hold a shared context.
Power is gifted from the people around
you.
Acceptance leads to alignment ..which
gets results as it gets round other people's
agendas and will .
People need a purpose and it is not a
salary, it's a reason to get out of bed.
Culture is critical and also brittle so
easily broken by removing elements.
Senior stakeholders should Look at the
prototype and say I want one of the those
Create a track record of small successes
rather than big bangs
And when you succeed don’t forget how
many times you failed before
If you are seen to so something that is
working your peers will copy you
Sit everyone together, including the
stakeholders
If you are a boss you need to look hard at
the skills in the team and bring the right
people together to create a great team
Ask people what they learned not what
they did

6. In a big organisation pick a thin slice, just one user journey.
Discover the user’s problem, make some sketches, build prototype, understand
the impact
Bin the prototype, move to alpha with the right tech, scalable, etc..
Hire brilliant people to get stuff moving fast and bust through the inertia of big
organisations
Give this team autonomy to complete the mission, it's not command and control,
put the power on the front line, numerous military examples!!
Gettingoverinertia

7. Premium vs commodity
.. Resist the inclination to compete on price, go
premium.
...Example is Moo.com: The same manufacturing
resource as even one else, so they push on premium,
humans assign value to expensive and no value to the
free stuff
... Sales increased as they increased prices, distinguish
on customer experience
Emotional vs functional
... You can't win on functionality, compete on emotion
... Example is Robin Hood the online brokerage: same
as everything else, but a lovable mission
What’sYourPlan?
Niche vs broad
...Don't go for the biggest market, other people are here. Find a specialism
and own this
...Example: Osper, pre-pay card for 8 to 18 year olds
Relational vs transactional
..The Zappos example with their no quibble returns policy, all paid for and
you have a year!
..Extremely loyal customers get you a very high NPS. Play the long game.
Exclusive vs open
...And under-utilised trick, make your customers feel special
...Example is "hem" and their VIP list
Curated vs a'la carte
...Human curation wins over algorithms
...Example is Spotify and Apple, both have human led playlists
...People want to follow people not machines. ...Taste makers are
orthogonal to to data led machines

8. Compare
andContrast
● How do you get the whole org to think in
small testable iterations?
● Build products for market opportunities not
individual points of view
● It's not a hierarchy, it's an effective team that
cuts across the org: marketing, sales,
support...
● This removes risk, but requires high levels of
integration, how do you get to this?

9. ...Andagain

10. MultipleOrgConfigsOnDisplay
Presi Xing Swiftkey Transferwise
Long form They did have
autonomous teams
focused on different
platforms. Now they have
a single common platform
team (The Force). The
platform team ensure the
autonomous dev team
can build great features
and products fast
Independent product org,
but product managers
embedded in teams
focussed on user groups
(B2C, B2B, B2c: mobile,
etc). It's not a hierarchy,
it's an effective team that
cuts across the org:
marketing, sales,
support...
The value of product is its
independence. Its needs
integrity if it is to add
value. Its role is to define
intent.
Full stack multidisciplinary
teams focused on critical
areas of the business:
Currencies: marketing,
vitality, etc.
Full stack also includes
marketing and ops
..in one line one platform with
separate product
development teams
Autonomous teams,
separate product
hierarchy
Hey, I’m the VP of product
look how cool I am
Destroy all egos (apart
from the ego of the VP of
growth!)

12. ..WheretheCoolKidsAreAt

13. ...andthekingofcool
Obama tweets
his product
His customer
support team
reply in song
..and when he worked at YouTube they live streamed someone jumping
from space and had 8% of the whole internet on their infrastructure!
their user’s data
creates pop stars