Product WEEK 2020

DEC 27-30 Online

Over the last decade or more, product managers and tech companies have gained influence and a seat at the executive table.
Rich will talk about moving from internal translators of technical stories to directly gathering customer insights, driving strategy, and focusing on end customer value in addition to revenue.

Bio:  Rich Mironov is a 35-year veteran of software product management including 6 B2B startups. He is a smokejumper product executive – parachuting into software companies to run product teams on an interim basis – and has coached scores of product leaders. He founded Product Camp, has been blogging about software product management since 2002 and his “Art of Product Management” was one of the first books on the subject.  Rich thinks a lot about product organizations, working with company executives, and the economics of software.

Products produce a single revenue stream, while platforms that connect two or products with synergy can accelerate it.

A large number of the world’s most valuable companies by market capitalization are platform companies and although some of those companies started with platforms, many started with products.

 Not every company, however, makes the leap successfully.

In this session, I will tell the JFrog platform story, what the product team should consider before and after taking this leap forward and what can make the difference between effective transformations and a failure.

A few unlocks to building customer trust and why is it so important

3 years ago at Klarna we redesigned our way of working in order to remove

dependencies between teams; enable them to run faster; and ship high quality

products that our customers will love. Quickly.

We realized that modifying the product manager role is key to achieving this goal.

That’s why today, product managers at Klarna are also “Accountable Leads”.

What does it mean to be an accountable lead?

How does this change impact the product manager role?

What have we learnt about this model in the last 3 years?

In this talk, I’ll share my two cents on this topic, as well as provide you with a

starter kit for adopting this model in your company.

When I first learned I needed to get my software product FDA approved, I panicked. Then I figured I could hack it. I was wrong on both counts.
This is the story of how I learned to love the regulatory landscape in which my products live and thrive.

Selling a product in a zero/low touch based SaaS is both challenging and fun. In this talk, we'll present 3 steps we took to increase the awareness and engagement of the developers community with our database optimization product. We'll discuss our tool based marketing approach, our specially crafted emails, and the engagement of our potential customers with our product.

How I aligned the company around a flexible initiative-driven roadmap and stopped lying to everyone.

Many of us build annual or quarterly product roadmaps by prioritizing the backlog based on each feature’s value and estimated effort. But the reality is that this hardly ever ends up as planned. In this talk I will show you how I implemented a practical process of prioritizing customer problems rather than features, resulting in better alignment of the company around a flexible and strategic initiative-driven roadmap.   

One day early in 2020, the entire world was thrown into "chaos” due to a fast spreading global pandemic. Suddenly, the customers’ needs and product usage changed dramatically.

The question became: how can we continue and manage our products during this crisis in real-time?

In this talk I will depict how the PM team rapidly adapted to the situation, collected the flux of information from clients, monitored these changes, and identified the crucial market needs.

I will also demonstrate a series of actions and products that were implemented in order to fit the new market needs, show how the crisis was overcome, and share general insights on innovative and dynamic product management

Why does Netflix think Tiger King is what I’ll want to watch next? Will knowing the reasoning behind their technology make a difference in how likely I am to follow their recommendation? 
As a product manager, developing explainable products is difficult and will not always have a direct effect on your metrics, so why invest in it? At Riskified, our customers’ transaction approval rate depends on us, which means we have to be adept at explaining our decisioning process while making sure our standard of accuracy stays at top performance. But what exactly is the tradeoff between accuracy and explainability? Is there a tradeoff at all?

 In this session, I’ll share my experience dedicating a year of development to explainability, even while it wasn’t clear how it would be reflected in our KPIs. I’ll show you how this led me to understand that not only are accuracy and explainability not in conflict but .when done right, they feed into each other, resulting in an ever-evolving Flywheel Effect

"A good PM uses empathy to get into their user's head and drive their experience in the direction maximizing the product goals". But are we really as good as we think we are? In this lightning lecture we'll challenge YOU to test your intuition and prove once and for all what the 'data-driven' approach is full of... Enter at your own risk of disappointment.

No one knows how long the coronavirus pandemic will last, but it should be obvious by now that even after we will go back to our normal routines - our users’ behaviors and habits might never be quite the same.

 As product managers we often find ourselves defining our user personas in the early stages of the product, but in the post-COVID world – will our personas remain the same?

I’m excited to share with you some of my thoughts and help you to embrace and adapt to this new world by better understanding your users, their new needs, new behaviors, and their new goals.

 In this talk, I will focus on 4 important ways this might impact your product, and will share some examples of products that have already adapted to the new world, including Microsoft Teams which I’m working on.

A product manager who is also a startup founder is responsible for the success of the company before the success of the product.

Product decisions are derived not only from customer needs, but also from marketing goals, sales, unit economic, fundraising, HR, and more.

In a startup, the level of uncertainty is high and the activity is constantly evolving. In such a reality, the goals are short-term, the cost of delay is high, and the decision-making process is super agile and minimalistic.

 On the other hand, the founder’s toolset is wider, and the product is just one tool for fulfilling the company’s vision.

As PMs we are expected to be data-driven and base decisions on user usage data. In this talk I will suggest a different approach of being data-informed, meaning that user usage data is only 1 source of input out of many to base product decisions on.

My personal story of how I transformed my product team into an independent empowered team, trusted by our management.

A one-year journey where we practiced extensive use of data, listening to the voice of the customer, and communicating effectively with executives. 

I'll share simple tools, techniques, and guidelines that any product manager can practice.

Bringing value to users is the mission for any product manager, but what happens when you have a feature that brings value to the business but not to it's users? What do you do next? 

Gong customers praise its product and give it high scores. In this talk, Eilon covers how the Gong team is executing towards high customer satisfaction and high user impact. Eilon reviews the main Gong product principles and team approaches to this end, and provides examples on how these principles come into play in practice