Transforming from a project to a product mindset is often interpreted as adopting methodologies such as Lean and Agile to iterate quickly and delight customers. Unfortunately, over relying on iteration and chasing customer delight can lead to common product diseases and doesn’t guarantee a successful product.

In this thought-provoking and interactive session, the author of Radical Product Thinking shares a concrete example to illustrate how focusing on iteration to delight customers can go awry and a radical approach to turn things around. You’ll learn to diagnose the common product diseases that are often fatal to innovation. You’ll gain practical tools to build world-changing products systematically and be inspired with the know-how to create change through your work, whether you’re an executive or an individual contributor.

To get your product funded and staffed, to get your team and your stakeholders aligned, to keep your customers and your executive sponsors engaged -- for your plan to have a chance, you’ve got to become the consummate leader.

In this talk, Bruce McCarthy walks you through his process for gaining and maintaining alignment within your team, among your stakeholders, and across your organization.

Successful product leaders are:

• Persuader - someone who understands their audience and homes in on the most relevant factors to influence a certain direction/decision
• Translator - someone who speaks the languages of the customer, the business, and technology
• Diplomat - someone who helps people see their own interest in collaboration
• Cheerleader - someone who make everyone feel important and involved
• Negotiator - someone who helps reconcile the irreconcilable
• Therapist - someone who listens with a genuine desire to help
• Poet - someone who paints a vivid picture of a future where we all benefit

Bruce breaks down the science, so you can practice the art.

A young product design team may be able to work scrappily and make decisions on the fly without a clear process. However, this approach won’t be sustainable as the organization, the product, and the team mature. So how might we address this?

Enter design principles. At a high level, they are a distillation of concepts that are most important to your product, your stakeholders, your users, and you as designers. Principles help shape your thinking, break down complex concepts, facilitate conversation with stakeholders, and guide your decision making so you can confidently align on a path forward.

In this session, I will outline step-by-step guidelines for constructing effective design principles and potential pitfalls to watch out for. I’ll also provide best practices and sample scenarios where these principles might come in handy, such as making product decisions and evaluating designs in crit sessions. As attendees, you will walk away with a solid understanding of what design principles are and how to use them as a tool to help your team operate, collaborate, and innovate.

Both DesignOps and ProdcutOps are emerging as new critical functions that can have a major impact in product organisations. The role of designOps and productOps are critical and essential, but the ways of working, the domains, the methodological approaches needs to be defined in order to enable constructive engagement models that impact the product experience, the teams' health and performance, and business metrics.

The talk will explore and expand this article https://uxdesign.cc/applying-designops-to-product-teams-3defc468a03

Truly empowered product teams are few and far between, which means that most have no idea what to do (or no power to act) when their organization’s initiatives go off the rails. Survival Metrics is a framework that allows product managers and teams to improve their decision fitness, so they know when to stop an initiative altogether, when to pivot their strategy, and when to invest more resources into its success. The framework operationalizes the three pillars of organizational survival — being fast, data-informed, and politically safe — giving teams the tools they need to remain agile and effective in the face of change.

You know what you have to manage to build a successful product - customers, users, developers, backlogs, roadmaps and such like. But there is one more factor that needs even more important management - you. We all have our inner demons that can limit our ability to be effective and enjoy the ride. Agile author and Product Leadership Coach Geoff Watts will highlight the key areas of self-mastery that Product Managers need to be aware of and give you tools and techniques to bring them into balance.

Why this subject - the motivation: According to a Product Plan report (Product Managers in 2020), 25% of Product Managers struggle with setting roadmap priorities without customer or market feedback, 15% struggle with planning and prioritising initiatives and 23% struggle with getting consensus on product direction. Product Managers/Product Owners are generally tasked with managing a backlog of difficult to prioritise requirements - a mish mash of features, bugs, sales requests, etc.

They struggle to prioritise because they do not understand how to align the backlog with outcomes they are trying to drive for either their business or their target customers.

What will attendees at the talk take away?

• Why customers are motivated by "outcomes" and not "outputs"
• Why Product Managers really need to help their company to define strategic OKRs so that they can align their Product OKRs
• Why a Product Strategy and a Product Roadmap might be different?
• How to simplify your life with an outcome focused roadmap
• How to position your roadmap for different stakeholders

Lean Inception is a framework that combines Design Thinking and Lean Startup, helping teams and organisations have breakthrough thinking and finding the MVP (Minimum Viable Product), to validate a hypothesis and be lean and fast on product development.

It supports bringing people together, aligning their thoughts and understanding the problem that needs to be resolved.

In this talk, I will cover the core of the methodology and why it has been so important to her and her customers, while building products.

Developing a successful product is not down to luck, a stroke of genius, or just trying hard enough. While these factors are helpful, product success starts with developing the right product strategy. Sadly, many teams do use effective strategy practices product strategy and are therefore not able to make the right strategic product decisions.

In my talk, I'll discuss how you can get the product strategy right. I'll explain how the strategy relates to the vision, the product roadmap, and the product backlog. I'll describe how the strategy is adapted to leverage opportunities and spot threats early, and I'll share who should own and who should contribute to it.

Despite our best protestations, we (Human beings) are an irrational and illogical species. We are full of idiosyncrasies and foibles that often defy logic. Yet, Product Managers work on developing solutions that are defined by logical research and data. This talk will challenge the current modus operandi of product thinking and explore how understanding the irrationally of our customers can help Product Managers build products that users truly love.

Have a vision of your product that you think could be successful? A new feature is only powerful if it has been validated with real users.

In this session, you will learn how to bring your ideas to life with prototyping and how to ensure your product is usable. You will learn why prototyping is crucial to innovation and how to build a prototype at varying fidelities. With these new skills you will then learn how to user test in a low-cost and effective way.

You will leave this session with the ability to build your own prototype and the skills to conduct effective user testing. By applying these practical techniques, you will be enabled to iterate and create products users love!

Everything is important. Everything is urgent. And everything is happening at the same time. The 'struggle to juggle' in product delivery is real.

Bringing together my experience of 15 years delivering (mostly) successful projects, I'm going to highlight some common productivity traps and outline the secret to productive teams.

Finally, I'll show you how you can transform the productivity of your team with this one weird trick…

We are excited to welcome Roman Pichler back to the Product Elevation stage for this Ask Me Anything Session!

To achieve true and lasting accessibility, organizations must be able to measure the real-world impact of accessibility issues and prioritize fixing critical problems that prevent people with disabilities from using your products or services. However, if accessibility feedback is prioritized along with all other feedback, critical accessibility issues may go unnoticed and unresolved, overwhelmed by minor inconveniences experienced by users who do not use assistive technology. And while automated testing is helpful and important, it gives no insight into the real-world impact any given error may have on your users with disabilities.

Drawing from Fable’s thousands of hours of experience performing testing and research involving people with disabilities, Samuel Proulx will provide a framework to help you prioritize accessibility issues. From tools like the AUS (Accessible Usability Scale), to video-based interviews and written test reports, we will help you understand how to collect, measure, and prioritize accessibility data from a user-first perspective. He will also demonstrate the critical importance of creating accessible processes, that are integrated into every facet of your product development lifecycle. If you are remediating an existing product and struggling to decide where to start, or you find that your accessibility efforts are not having the impact you need, this talk can help you.

We've all seen product management memes on social media - they're seen as disposable but can we learn anything from them? In this talk I'll speak about some of my own Twitter memes that have resonated with my followers, and what they tell us about the art of product management.

Professional team coaching is finally gaining traction and over the coming years will the focus on it will only increase with recognised professional coaching bodies sharing their accreditations for it. What astounded me is that the similarities between what has been happening in the agile world around team coaching and professional team coaching are high, the problem? The agile world have no empirical data to back up their claims,

The Product world has a unique opportunity to embrace what is being proven in the Professional coaching world, anecdotal evidence from the agile world and a heavy dose of Product expertise really develop the field of Product Team Coaching.

I have worked with many Product Teams and many other teams and combined with the right research believe that I have a practical and mind-broadening approach to coaching Product Teams to share.

Hemnet is the largest property portal in Sweden, a business that has both a B2B and a B2C offering, and a company striving to be product-led.

In 2021, after setting a new product strategy that was based on customer outcomes, we were forced to think about what was the best way to choose the opportunities that would help us deliver customer and business value. This is where our journey with the opportunity solution tree and continuous discovery began. In the course of a year, we went from one team testing the framework, to all the product teams adopting it. And as often happens, the same framework used by different teams, led to really different outcomes.

What I want to share is our journey, and its ups and downs, with a focus on what have seen working for us and what have been the biggest challenges we encountered.

I believe that hearing how a popular framework can be applied in real life, and how you sometimes can't be by the book, can be interesting for product teams who are thinking about going down the same path.

We look for organizations focused on what really matters: discover and create attractive, useful, usable and profitable products.

A clear Product Strategy enables the whole organization to connect the company goals and business objectives with the needs and expectations of customers, even in contexts of uncertainty or continuous change.

Session´s outline:

• Why do we need Product Strategy
• How we define and add Value to Customers
• Moving from outputs to outcomes
• Product Teams
• Getting out of the Features Factory Mindset
• Business Agility inside and around Product Teams
• The evolution towards Product-centered organizations
• Product Strategy in Action: applying the DHM Model from Gibson Biddle to shape your Product Strategy

For current or aspiring product leaders, this talk is about the transition from Product Manager to managing a group of Product Managers. As a newly-minted manager, you often need to stop doing the good things that got you there in the first place. If you continue doing hands-on product work, what autonomy does that give your team? On the other hand, lean out too far and you risk becoming just a line manager, rather than providing any real leadership or direction.

If you have built up good experience as a Product Manager and want to move into management, making this transition successfully is a key milestone in your career. And more often than not, nobody prepares you for it.

In this session, I’ll talk about some pitfalls, some good ideas and welcome any questions, suggestions and discussion in the room.

Hold tight! More information about this session is coming soon!

This talk will be a hands-on session on helping you build your product or service around customers' values and needs. We will use the Osterwalder Value Proposition Canvas which incorporates "Jobs to be Done" (JTBD) in its framework to help us better understand customer behavior. JTBD theory goes beyond superficial categories to expose the functional, social, and emotional dimensions that explain why customers make the choices they do. People don’t simply buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress.

Storytelling is increasingly important to gain stakeholder buy in and interest and as UX researchers, we need to leverage it to help connect stakeholders with the end user so that they feel empowered to meet the needs of the end users when building products.

Hold tight! More information about this session is coming soon!

There is incredibly quick turnover in the product design world. 51% of designers begin looking for new opportunities within a year due to poor leadership and stagnant growth. Revitalizing a stale design org for growth opportunities, scaling and employee retention is vital to survival in the product world.

Like any other user experience problem, the key to designing an organization that works for everyone is to listen to your users. In this case, that means the members of your team. You have to dig deep and get to the root of systemic problems and find out what the people want.

I initiated this case study as a personal project out of frustration with my own growth on an idle team. I conducted all research, interviews, surveys, data analysis and process creation for this project and turned it into a proposal for departmental expansion and title review. The main obstacle I faced with this research was lack of resources and support from management, so I did what any leader does…figure it out anyway.

The case study can be reviewed here: https://stephaniehallcreative.com/leadership

How content designers work, and what value they add across the product design process. This talk will highlight examples of what content design deliverables look like at different stages of product development, and how these deliverables help teams make an impact.