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.