Product Strategy

Too often companies bite off more than they can chew, spreading the teams thin across many initiatives. Now, more than ever it's important to make sure everyone is aligned and moving toward the same goals. But how do we do that? Enter, Product Strategy. Creating a robust Product Strategy framework is the key to making sure everyone is working on the most important things. No matter what level you are in the company, you can help bring focus by asking the right questions, crafting a great product strategy, and communicating up to leadership.

Andy will take your questions for Melissa.

As a Product Manager, your job isn't to ship features. Your job is to change customer behaviour, and to do it in a way that creates value for you, your customers, your users, and the world. Easy right? In this talk, Josh will help you understand how products change behaviour, why it's important to your business that they do this, and how to go about doing exactly this.

Andy will take your questions for Josh.

An increasingly complex climate of strategic challenges mires the agility of organizations. The stakes are higher - from increasing ethical scrutiny of digital systems, evolving regulatory frameworks, through to a rising awareness towards sustainability. The answers aren’t clear, but the ability to foster cross-functional discussions within your organization has never been more important. Creating these inclusive moments across teams can help craft a common vision, helping each team contribute to the market challenge. Designers are uniquely positioned to facilitate these discussions and guide the development of strategic initiatives using prototyping & testing techniques typically reserved for customer experiences. There is rising recognition of tools like the Design Sprint, and other Design Thinking based workshops – these coincide with the maturity of design as a core discipline We frequently turn these tools outwards towards customer needs, it’s intuitive to rally collaboration around a researched & defined customer truth. With a few twists, experienced facilitators can turn these tools inwards and help their peers and executives better navigate complex problem spaces and manage multiple, competing truths.

I am noticing a trend. Increasingly, I am seeing the rifts between designers and developers heal, and the rifts between developers/designers and product management widen. Why is this happening? What can we do to address this (often unhealthy) tension for the benefit of our customers, teams, and organizations? In this talk we will explore the why behind these shifts. Then we will focus on actionable “hacks” to move forward and improve. We’ll touch on potentially valuable mental models, frameworks, activities, safe-to-fail experiments, and “try this next week” calls to action. Throughout, I will try to share what I’ve learned speaking to product teams across a wide spectrum of contexts.

Andy will take your questions for John & Haroon

Thanks to everyone for a brilliant Day 1 - a few words from Andy about tomorrow and the rest of the week.