Where We Learn

Product Stories & Observations
3 min readJun 2, 2019

On our work wiki We have a section called “Where We Learn”. It is just a collection of links to conference talks and podcasts, but each one is picked to reflect an aspect of product management that I think is important.

Sharing here so it is easier to get to. Feel free to look for ideas to borrow and make your own.

Conference Talks

Products For Your Own People

Comment: Awesome presentation about why internal products matter and how to get them improved by talking about impact

The video (from The product Management Festival in 2015) has gone for this, which is a real shame. But the key points still stands: Lead with impact, create momentum with earay adopters, regualry use senior stakeholders to advocate for the importance of the project and get them to use the product

How to screw Up B2B

Comment: Covers solution selling and includes the key quote: “In B2B you will never be your customer, you have to go and meet them”

Lessons learned, especially about failure

Comment: Important notes about metrics. But is mainly about the importance of resilience that is a super important part of product leadership

Lean UX

Comment: By the guy that wrote the book!. Love the idea of changing your team names to missions

Running A Workshop With Senior Stakeholders

Comment: Recommend by an audience member after giving a talk in London. The funny delivery makes it memorable.

Escaping the Build trap

Comment: Good talk from Mind the Product about avoiding building features just for the sake of it

Podcasts

Adding this one from Miro as it has great stories about empathy in design sprints and also key insights into how to organise product teams around personas and the use of a framework called AMP: Analytics, Marketing and Product

Great story of building the super minimum to test the concept before getting into the heavy lifting that is product engineering.

And this one includes a great section on the use of headlines/slogans to keep teams focused on the goal and also a lot of detail on job architecture.

Really interesting talk about the importance of candour and trust and how this impacts company culture.

Great podcast about how solving customer problems makes you a great business.

Also includes some cool insights about local preferences: It is all about cash in Italy, In Nordics people pick up from hubs and in Spain its social media to the front, while E-commerce lags

It’s about facilitation, but could also be about product. Either way lots to learn

  • Bring the visions
  • Challenge the creatives
  • Manage the competing specialists
  • Magic happens between the plan
  • Manage the tangents / keep the focus

The Basics

Two nice videos covering the basics

Note: Original post published in June 2019, various updates to add useful links since then as my view is it is better to have all this stuff in one place. Latest Update Sept 2020

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Product Stories & Observations

Product management, scaling teams, product design processes, collaboration, team culture, empathy, research, story telling plus a little luck and magic