Product
Excellerate 2022

It seems like there’s never enough. Your company might have the resources for illustrated portraits of all the office dogs, but when you want to test that really cool feature you thought of last night, well—all the resources are already spoken for. Or maybe you don’t have a company or any dev resources. So you don’t even have those pretty dog portraits. But you have this idea you want to validate because you’re pretty sure it could be a billion-dollar product. 

Sounds familiar? Welcome to my world. In “Product on a shoestring”, I’ll talk about my experience as the poorest guy in the richest orgs, explore different techniques on how to push your product forward even when resources are scarce, and how to use the results to get more resources than the dog-portrait illustrator.  

In this lecture, I will talk about some actionable tips for building your foundations and getting more value out of your data, even if you don't have a lot of data or clients (B2B).

I'll talk about my experience as a data leader and some practical tips that helped me along the way.

Simply’s (formerly Joytunes) strategy is creating a single household subscription (similar to Netflix or Spotify) that helps people with their creative hobbies and passions. We started with teaching piano and guitar but are expanding to more and more domains. At the heart of our competitive advantage is the “secret sauce” of building amazing products that users love and discuss. Products that have a deep emotional and magical core, making complex things (like learning to play) simple. The presentation will share key elements of our “secret sauce” through the story of launching Simply Sing: our new singing app, which was done in record time, and is delivering great value. The app helps people who like to sing by adapting songs to their voice and giving them feedback and guidance on how to sing better.

We completed the initial discovery within ~6 weeks and identified a new innovative opening in the market with limited competition.  A team of 5 people launched the app within three months after discovery and then continued to evolve the app at a rapid pace. The app received extremely high user ratings (in the store, through surveys and interviews). It achieved “hot app” status within three months and was featured by apple. We improved our core KPI (D2 retention) by 50% and got 150K downloads with almost no marketing.

When we think of execution, we often think of resources, but it’s not always the case. When we wanted to build our Gantt chart, we had a huge opportunity and a very small team — so it was time for us to get creative. Sound familiar? 

In this lecture, we’ll cover practical tools we picked up that helped us motivate our team, bring real business impact early into the project, and create a culture of fast delivery. 

While AI is increasingly prevalent and applicable to any industry, many product leaders and product managers haven’t had a chance to incorporate it into their products yet. It’s not always trivial to figure out how one can move from a state of basic understanding of the added value and transformational power of AI, to an actionable and cost-effective plan for incorporating AI. Some keys to success include choosing the right problem to solve with AI, the optimal KPIs, and the appropriate training data.

As DoubleVerify has successfully gone through this process in the last couple of years, we’d like to share with you some of our learnings (aka mistakes), pitfalls that we’ve encountered, and best practices for building a cost-effective path to ML products.

In this talk, Hadas will review Gmail from its launch till today, from a user and a PM perspective.

Some of the questions that will be addressed: Why do users love Gmail? Why do others hate it? What is the future of Email? How should Gmail build for this future?

About the difference between vendors and partners, the great value of strategic partnerships, and a few key pointers on your path to partnership execution.

How can we deliver more value in a shorter time frame? While it sounds counterintuitive, you should stop considering time estimates and deadlines.

With over 20 years of experience both on the development side as well as the product side, I've seen teams spending too much time on time estimations and deadlines. Sprint planning, estimating features, creating Gantt charts, commitments to customers, and building feature-based roadmaps. Too much time is wasted on the planning and less on the actual work.

In this lecture, I'll talk about what we can do as product managers, in collaboration with the dev team, to get value out of the door quicker.  It's not the deadlines; it’s your product thinking. 

Since 2010, I’ve been practicing product management as a product manager, a leader of PMs, and a VP of Product. Previously, I worked as a developer for seven years. One could say I’ve had a very intimate view of the creation and evolution of the PM role, particularly in Israel.  

Product management initially evolved from various roles, including project managers and system analysts. In fact, for many years, product management positions were part of the engineering organization. Over time, the role evolved beyond an engineering execution role to the business side.

Generally speaking, many organizations divide their product management practice into two types of PMs: Inbound and Outbound. Inbound PMs were responsible for the technical execution, with titles such as Technical PM, Product Owner, Program Manager, etc. In contrast, outbound PMs spent most of their time with sales teams, customers, support, etc. Many companies also adopted hybrid models, such as the Full-Stack Product model, which designates the responsibility of a particular part of a product to a PM but with a more balanced investment of inbound and outbound work.  

The approach we’ve adopted at Torq, which is becoming more commonplace industry-wide, leans heavily towards the outbound approach. Most product management resources are invested in the strategic challenges of building a company and its product, leaving the engineering execution to software engineers. The approach one chooses impacts how to build both product and engineering teams and, more or less, the entire company. In my session, I will demonstrate the essence of this approach, what I call “Strategic Product Management”, and explain how it enabled Torq to quickly reach product-market-fit.

Software is eating the world, but this rather new engineering field is very different from any other engineering field. Those differences mark the heart of software’s strengths as well its weaknesses. In this talk, Nir Sagiv, who worked throughout his career on both sides of the product-engineering duo, will share how product managers can help tame this beast and extract the best out of software.

Abstract:When we saw that an agile approach pushed our breakthrough innovation further and further away, we realized that sometimes planning into the far future can make that future start happening tomorrow. In other words, we’ve brought innovation much sooner, by roadmapping for much later.So, how far ahead should you plan for?In this talk I’ll show the process we went through, and give some simple tips that helped me grow as a PM in building strategic roadmaps.

In the past, I worked as a PI (private investigator), and in the last few years, I realized that product management is quite similar in obtaining data about your users/suspects.

In both cases, you must perform out-of-the-box thinking to reach the relevant people and data.
Because it can take time to discover, research, and digest data, there is always a conflict between trying to move fast and making a data-driven decision.
In my talk, I will give practical tips and showcase examples of how I was able to gather data in less time to make the right decisions.

Product managers & sales relationships may have inherent challenges. In this talk, we'll see why some of the common failures are actually opportunities that we, as product managers, and our product can benefit from. Relevant to any startup/ company with a sales organization, both in B2B and B2B2C products.

Being a user of your product can be a huge business upside and a great advantage for Product Managers. The more you can use your product regularly and experience it as a user, the better. But what if this is a hard target to achieve? How can you be in tune with your users and design the best product and journeys when you cannot put yourself in your user’s shoes?

In this case, relying on very close communication with your users is the next best thing.

How do you embed a customer insight approach in your product decision-making processes?

How can you adopt a customer ‘closeness’ mindset within a business?

How can you use customer insight to win in product?

In this session, Roee Peled, 888 VP Product, will take us through the journey towards a customer insight led organization and the tools Product Manager can adopt to become more attentive to their customers’ needs.

In the realm of AI and Neural Networks, a new art is born: a product manager that leads stochastic products where features work randomly. Product management of “inconsistent done criteria”; Release dates defined by the “learning AI Model” and not engineers; and delivery of amazing features - as long as customers use the same data that “The Model” used.

Today, almost every product should add AI capabilities, and this is not yet another technology and engineering problem but rather a new way of product management:

From managing teams, people, tasks, requirements, stories, and customer satisfaction – the new product manager now needs to manage an artificial intelligent creature.

In this presentation, we will discuss how to work with our new AI colleague (aka “The Model”), where the solution is probably: to develop an AI (Neural Network) stochastic product management methodology.