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.

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.

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.

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!

There are so many practices, resources and tools available that focuses on Outcome. But how can we be certain it’s the right one for us?

We'll share some real-life examples of how some team benefited with the tools and practices we've used in Red Hat Open Innovation Labs to change the focus from outputs to outcomes.

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

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

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.

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.

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