Most product teams review goals in hindsight to see whether they have succeeded. But what if you could not just assess what you’ve already done but prioritize your actions along the way? This workshop will teach you strategies and techniques you can immediately apply during your next OKR definition workshop.

We are entering a time where the power of 8 billion to create is upon us. The constraints of cost and closed clubhouses for creativity are about to end.

A global community of creators with the tools, support, and capital to change the way the world works are here. It's People first, Crowd first, transparent, and decentralized—the question is what is the system to get us there?

New technologies are making it easier, cheaper, and faster for anyone to be an entrepreneur, create companies, and bring their bold ideas to life. This speed of company creation needs a new type of system to support and scale the sea of fresh ideas, from hundreds of thousands of people with the power to now pursue them.

While it sounds so exciting, many still wonder what has been stopping them. I will show you, and how at Nobody Studios we're aiming to create 100 compelling companies over in the 5 years. Build with us.

Popularized by Google’s financial success, OKRs have been widely adopted by companies to communicate goals and measure progress. We’ve come to believe that OKRs and goal-setting is the key to scaling our products and companies.

In reality, most companies implementing OKRs see a series of unfortunate side effects, and several studies have confirmed how goal-setting can be detrimental to innovation. OKRs often cause the product disease Hypermetricemia. In this interactive session, we’ll talk about the symptoms of Hypermetricemia and how you can get the same benefits of OKRs while avoiding the unintended consequences. We’ll discuss radical ideas that challenge conventional wisdom on goal setting. You’ll walk away with practical tools to align your teams on the impact you want to create and measure progress along the way.

The great 21st century philosopher, Spiderman, once said that with great power comes great responsibility. But in the world of Product Management, great responsibility comes with no power! Product Management is the ultimate political battlefield. However, instead of bemoaning the politics, this talk will discover how we, as Product Managers, can navigate the political landscape in order to influence product decisions and build great products.

Despite an overall increase in the "UX maturity" of companies and organizations, many design and research departments are still being treated like inhouse "service providers". This legacy mindset demotivates teams and, more importantly, makes it hard to unlock the real value of a user-centered organization to create delightful products powered by innovation.

That's why I've decided to rebrand Product Design and Researchers as "product detectives" who chase down the clues and test the theories that help companies solve the mystery of better products. In this talk I'll share my strategy for applying this new way of working and selling it internally.

Organisations and the people within them tie themselves in knots through the inconsistent and at times sporadic use of terms such as "Platform" and "Product" often resulting in these being nothing more than useless jargon. The problem with this? If an organisation has agreed to have a "Whole Product Focus" or "Platform First" focus if no one knows and agrees upon what the terms mean we get nowhere quickly.

Coaching Sessions

Do you know when you should pivot? What about your ideas, are they being listened to? In fact, even when you are proven right after a horrible launch, do you have that sinking feeling that everyone knew this was a bomb, but just didn’t know how to say it?

Being a change agent in an organization, especially one where a product is in flight, is hard. While teams may be happy to talk about strategy and even know what it looks like, the idea of understanding when something fails and HOW to move forward when it does escapes teams. There isn’t a shared language that helps them figure this out.

This leaves teams holding their ideas close to the chest. Their fear: an unsure political environment and unclear data will make their insight useless. This leads to “business as usual,” where everyone smiles on Zoom even while initiatives are headed to disaster.

Enter Survival Metrics, a framework that helps teams use what's important to the company (think - “values”) and operationalize them as metrics that make change much easier. In effect, teams get a dashboard-like artifact that is understandable to various teams inside of your organization. This helps clarify action steps, makes values very clear, and surface incentives that help teams pivot in a fast, politically safe, and data informed way.

In an era of faster, faster, faster, our workplaces are sacrificing quality, collaboration, and the customer experience to “just ship it.” Business goals don’t seem to overlap with customers’ needs. Companies hire anybody who threw buzzwords on their resume without knowing how to assess talent. Customers don’t want Minimally Viable anything, but we keep serving that up.

Customers notice when we get it wrong. Our competitors, investors, shareholders, the press, bloggers, and social media notice. Morale suffers, and we might have trouble retaining or hiring the best practitioners. Great customer experiences require the right team and strategies in place to predict and mitigate the risk of delivering wrong or flawed products, services, and experiences (PSE). Marketing and sales initiatives have uphill battles when we are offering PSE that are difficult to learn, frustrating to use, or not meeting customers’ real needs.

No matter what an Agile coach, Scrum master, or stakeholder declares, the customer decides what is “quality,” “done,” and “good enough.” This session has actionable advice and models for how you can start shifting process, teams, and our companies towards true customer-centricity.

You've adopted the latest in upstream design thinking and Lean discovery practices, and taken an agile approach downstream to deliver your products quickly and with high quality. However, something still feels amiss - it feels like you're stuck in a feature factory, and what you ship to production doesn't quite have the impact you expected. In this talk, David & Dionatan will share their experiences and suggestions to answer the question: "What happens after you ship?" We will explore concrete patterns to shift from focusing on outputs to outcomes. Enter the era of The Third Stream.

Coaching Sessions

There are many practices/methods which help with product thinking and refocusing on outcomes rather than outputs. All of them can easily become abused or misused too. We will explore simple changes to common practices like Impact mapping, Empathy mapping, Relative sizing, Story estimates and more, which can help you shift the focus on outcomes in only a matter of a few hours of work with your team.

The product landscape is now hyper-competitive.

There are 10x more websites & apps than there were just 10 years ago.

That means you can't just build an MVP and expect it to be used.

Modern users demand better.

That's where the Minimal Viable Offer comes in.

Products fail because they fail to escape competition.

In this talk, I will outline how you can escape competition by validating whether you product is uniquely valuable BEFORE building a thing, as well as discussing why this is an essential skill for all aspiring product leaders.

This is a process we have taught hundreds of PMs to use - many even generating revenue from an idea within 2-3 weeks & with zero cost.

And a process we'll be compacting into this hands-on, actionable talk.

The products we make are the reflection of our society. Without being intentional, we will often fail at including all the people we want to engage with.

With new technologies increasing the pace of innovation every day, companies demand a constant supply of fresh ideas. These ideas will then be turned into products to drive customer value. However, not all of these new products will be successful capturing market share and some will fail to make an impact in the market. Now the questions is, How can we predict the future of an idea? How do we know which idea worth our time and investment? The answer is we can never be 100% sure but there are techniques to help us find the right direction and have more confidence in our idea. This talk is about about how Lean Experimentation can help to reduce the risk of product failure . I will be talking about how to make more informed decisions throughout your innovation journey by getting data from small, quick experiments from the very beginning.

Coaching Sessions

There are many practices/methods which help with product thinking and refocusing on outcomes rather than outputs. All of them can easily become abused or misused too. We will explore simple changes to common practices like Impact mapping, Empathy mapping, Relative sizing, Story estimates and more, which can help you shift the focus on outcomes in only a matter of a few hours of work with your team.

Multiple frameworks and tools are designed to help us understand what to build, but somehow we still ship products that don’t gain traction. While we like to think we’re following the best practices, what actually happens in most teams is “Build, Ship, Build, Ship.”

The roadmap gets a lot of blame for this culture. Whether people think the roadmaps themselves are bad, or think they are good tools that are simply misunderstood or misused, it is pretty clear that there is something wrong with roadmaps.

In this talk, Bruce McCarthy, co-author of Product Roadmaps Relaunched, will tell us:

• why we ship the wrong thing

• what a roadmap is and is not

• the 5 components of a good roadmap

• how gain alignment on your roadmap.

In the past, writers have been lonely individuals on product and design teams. They have been locked out from the design and creative process, only to receive the 'finished product' to review or proof-read. Words as the foundation of our interactions with digital systems, have not been seen as such. But now, content design is growing, and lorem ipsum is fading away in favour of a focus on content at the beginning, middle and end of the design process. This means that both content designers and UX writers need to be generous and considerate when it comes to sharing skills and collaborating— and other designers need to appreciate the need for a keen eye on language and content throughout. In this talk, Grace will talk about the ways in which content design can be an enriching, collaborative process and how we can adopt a content-first process. She will also look at conversation design as an important new discipline, and how interaction, visual, business and data designers can use their skills in the service of great conversation.

A difference you can make! Our goal as product managers is to build products that our customers love. Chances are your customer base is diverse. While we don’t want to build for everyone, we should be aware of the impact our products can have. Hiring a diverse team is a great long-term strategy, but how can you get started right now? I want to give you some tools you can start using right after this talk to make your discovery and delivery more inclusive.

Coaching Sessions

In this ask-me-anything (AMA) session, I'll answer questions from the audience on the difference between the product manager and the product owner roles.

OKRs are fantastic on paper - empower your teams by focusing on outcomes! Align every team to your strategy! Work in transparent harmony! However most of us know that things in the real world are not so rosy. Using her experience of implementing OKRs at OVO Energy, a fast growth scale up, plus working closely with organisations such as Nat West Group and Deloitte on their OKR implementations, Kim aims to draw the line between the theory and the practicality of OKRs and answer the question - is the hassle really worth the pain?

We care more and more about the environment, but why do we pay so little attention to our cognitive resources? We are overloaded with information, which is why it is so important to extract the most valuable knowledge for decision-making from the wealth of data.

In the field of product development, we do user research, behavior analysis, and others, generating a great deal of data. So do we need more data? We definitely want it, but what we need is to manage it properly. I would like to share with you my approach to the research economy and how to get the best insights from a huge bunch of data.

Most of our teams are part of a wider org. But what if your team was a stand-alone business? What if you had customers paying for your service, and investors seeking a return? Would they be happy? How would you know?

In larger organisations, we can learn a lot from the behaviours, attitudes and challenges of smaller companies. While listening to this talk, pretend your team is a start up. I'll ask some simple questions and describe a few scenarios. Your answers might give you an interesting new perspective on how your product team operates.

Coaching Sessions

This is a session for you to bring your questions, topics, experience and anything you like around Product-led Ways of Working and will be facilitated by the Agile Beer Founder, Coca Pitzer.

Here's the thing: You might not have a lot of time and resources to dedicate to social media, but you definitely know how important it is for your business. I get it.

In this quick but valuable session I'm going to share with you 5 secrets behind building a big brand, even if you're a small company with limited resources.

If you want to differentiate yourself in your industry, get more qualified inbound leads and make your sales process smooth as butter - this is the session for you!

I'm going to teach you how to use social media (even as a small team or one-person show) to position yourself as a thought leader so you can focus more on the work and less on the sale.

This talk includes a mini-workshop! You'll leave with actionable ideas for strategic content you can use to start building your brand right away.

Donal will share with us how Verizon Connect is putting the customer at the centre of every discussion and, crucially, every decision. AKA talk is cheap or actions speak louder than words.

We all know the stories about product management. We've all seen the classic PM Venn diagram. Influencing without authority, dealing with ambiguity, technical & communication skills - these are all important skills for any effective PM. But what happens when you become a product leader?

Coaching Sessions

Between 70 and 90% of all new products fail. Almost 2/3 of all startup investments lose money. Not surprisingly, organizational resistance to risk is the No. 1 barrier for innovation. So, what’s the conclusion? Not investing in innovation? Well, that could even be more fatal…

During this presentation, Marcus will share several frameworks and tools for assessing and managing the risks of product innovation.

Based on Michael’s bestseller : Project Influence and Leadership

After hiking towards a glacier in Denali National Park Alaska, we were making camp near a small dreary lake. Suddenly I heard my friend saying: “Michael there’s a bear here, it is on this side of the lake”. And there it was, a 250 pounds Grizzly not more than 10 feet away…frightened to our underwear we followed through with the recommended protocol for bear encounters in the wild…we waved our hands and begged it not to snack on us…years later I had a similar bearish encounter with a CFO at a fortune 100 company; this time waving my hands above my head was futile; we had to come up with an influence approach fast!

There is no right way, nor is there only one way to influence others. Your job requires you to influence just about all of the time. It may take the form of gaining support, inspiring others, persuading other people to become your champions, engaging someone's imagination, creating relationships.

Whatever form it takes, being an excellent influencer makes your job easier.

In this practical and insightful presentation, the audience will learn best practices for leading and influencing without authority, giving them the skills, they need to effectively persuade others, listen and engage as product leaders, lead diverse teams, and get valuable products delivered better, safer and happier.

The Google Ventures Design Sprint has revolutionised product development over the last number of years. This fast paced process has decreased the risk of failed products for organisations everywhere. One other benefit that has come out of this process is and approach to problem solving. Taking that Design Thinking mindset to a whole new level.

In this session we are going to attempt to run a Design Sprint in 45 minutes. This will be a very hands-ons session where we will be using the digital whiteboard Mural to enable effective fast paced collaboration. We are going to attempt to solve a very relevant problem within 45 minutes.

Due to recent events, the remote work process is a necessity now. It's equally important for startups and the corporate world. As a startup founder or a product manager, it's your duty to ensure your business success not only from the marketing perspective but from the perspective of building a great product users would love. During this presentation, Alexey will share the process his team used to manage over 150 projects and over 600 developers over the past 3 years. You will learn: - How is remote work process different from "in-office" setup, - How to structure the remote team management process for your product development and UX teams, and much more.

Coaching Sessions

Assumption Mapping is a concept and method from the book "Testing Business Ideas" written by David J. Bland und Alexander Osterwalder.

With this methods innovative companies, experimental organisations and entrepreneurs clarify, which assumptions they make about a new offer, a product or service. 

The methods helps them to reveal if these assumptions are based on data or pure speculations at the moment.  

If the assumptions are pure speculations, they should be tested and more data gathered before time and money is spend on product development. 

On this base this remote workshop was created including a Mural template with instructions to run through the exercises.

So your team has hit some measure of product market fit – your first few features have been a hit – you built, released, listened to customer feedback and then you made improvements and your metrics are moving in the right direction and people keep hiring the product for the job you intended. You’re thinking of scale and you want to make sure you keep doing this successfully. That means your company keeps growing. You’ve heard many stories of companies crashing and burning and building features that customers don’t care about.

You NEED to avoid this future.

What you need is a well-designed product system. Product Systems are all the practices, processes, principles, tools and rituals that help ensure high quality products and how they connect to create a culture of consistent customer-driven innovation. It codifies how your team can build ANYTHING so it can be successful. Dive in with Oji to learn about how to be intentional about HOW you build so you can be successful almost every time.

Content designers have a unique point of view and skillset that can super charge your team's efforts toward product goals—if they have the time. Learn how content designers and UX writers can impact product strategy and cross-organizational processes, and how to empower writers in your team to do just that.

An exploration into the how companies can deliver what is best for their Customers. For a long time, discerning what is right for Customers had been the responsibility of various teams in the business. However, in this digital-native era knowing what is right for one's Customers has become increasingly difficult - why? Because Customer motivations and expectations are evolving at a rapid pace. Join on this journey where we try to answer - who knows best?

Coaching Sessions

Powerful questions are catalysts for inspiration, innovation, and introspection. They prevent a rush to judgement, while nudging us forward along a learning journey. As a product manager we’re expected to have all the answers. But if we resist that -- if we focus on fostering environments where great questions can emerge -- we can truly support our team(s), and let those questions guide our work.

In this talk we will explore techniques for brainstorming and refining questions. I’ll present a couple accessible frameworks you can use in your day-to-day work (and that I use daily in my workshops with teams from around the world). We’ll wrap up with some thoughts on how to navigate the pressure for certainty.