At this year’s annual end-of-year collab meeting in Hamburg, we took a closer look at what we have learned in 2024 by bringing together our local groups with an open invite to other community members, a few selected speakers and created a curated packed afternoon with a dozen lightning talks.
Attending this year was a bigger crowd than past years — a diverse set of digital leaders from large, complex and global organisations like Canyon, Jungheinrich, Lufthansa, OTTO alongside agencies such as Diconium and Thoughtworks as well as software firms like CoreMedia, Magnolia, Staffbase and a few other friends from near and far.
Employee communication platform software firm Haiilo hosted us in their charming offices, which was a fitting scene for learning and networking.
Read moreBrandwatch, like many others, is a sales-led software organisation where customers are acquired by marketing and sales and later onboarded.
Lately, they've been moving more and more into the product-led domain, having free trials, letting people onboard themselves. This requires the product team to think very differently than before.
In a recent member call, Product Director Andrius Knispelis dived into product-led growth, advised on when to do free trials, how you can better use onboarding and shared quite a few helpful examples. Let’s start with the promise of a product that sells itself.
Read moreMaterial extraction and the subsequent production of those materials into products is one of the leading causes of climate change, and product manufacturers are under increasing pressure to reduce this impact and close the loop on product manufacturing.
At circulist, founder & CEO Nick Gonios, is leading a mission driven venture and building a tomorrow where products are made to be used rather than thrown away. Where circular design and intelligent ecosystems will enable us to reuse and recycle natural resources, and where products can be good for people and the planet.
Nick is based in Sydney, Australia and focused on the current wicked problem of overconsumption and growing e-waste and systemic challenges. In a recent member call, Nick introduced us to Circular Economy version 2 which better drives positive impact.
Read moreAs a product leader, how do you change the culture of a group of engineers to be more customer-centric? Lauren St. Jean is Senior Product Manager at German neobank N26 in Berlin and recently hosted a member conference call, where she shared her experiences trying to change how backend teams think.
A little over a year ago, Lauren started working with a backend platform engineering group composed of component teams. Talking to them about a customer mindset and beginning to think of their area of responsibilities more holistically and focused on customer problems rather than just improving performance, was greeted with less than optimistic enthusiasm from many engineers.
Read moreHow do you really scale a product organisation? This is one of the topics we keep getting back to in our product management community.
Growing pains are familiar in the software business and product management is a key part of taking any product firm from the early stages to the next level.
In a recent member conference call, VP Product Derek Koch from Bay Area-based software firm Pointcare hosted a talk titled “Evolving Product in a Scaling Business”. Based on his vast experience, he shared how to best set the stage to enable and support growth in your company.
Read moreAnyone can learn a framework like OKRs for example, but to be the best product leader you need more than that. You need the strategic skills to lead without authority, to inspire and to empower.
This quote is from a conversation with Berlin-based product manager Lisa Mo Wagner. She talked about what it really takes to be a true product leader, she shared her take on the role of a product manager, being a part of building something super valuable and much more.
Lisa works as Senior product manager at Berlin-based fintech Finiata, is the organiser of Women In Product - Berlin and is our expert of the month.
Read moreThere is an upsweep of interest in sectors and industries that many software product managers historically ignored.
In short, we seem to be moving to a ’Supply Chain Thinking’ environment. The enforced isolation has put a spotlight on the global supply chain, from food through energy to pharmaceuticals and beyond. Their critical role in keeping the world operable, and the sheer scale of these operations is capturing the attention of product managers.
The potential is there, the scale is there, but few know how to even start to build and sell into these markets.
Read moreTech companies exploiting consumers is unfortunately nothing new and dark patterns remain commonplace.
Still, we are experiencing a shift in consumer behaviour, where ethics matter more. How do you actually do ethical design from the beginning? To answer this and to and share practical techniques to make honest interfaces work, To answer this and to and share practical techniques to make honest interfaces work, Trine Falbe, Kim Andersen and Martin Michael Frederiksen have co-authored the new Ethical Design Handbook.
Read more"Content" can become a headache or an afterthought in many projects—but it doesn't have to be that way. In our recent conference call, Katie Del Angel from Shopify shared her perspective as a product content strategist at Shopify.
From defining scope to gaining team alignment, developing concepts and solutions to ensuring scalable implementation, the tools of content strategy can help product leaders every step of the way during projects.
Whether you have a content strategist on your team or not, having content strategy techniques in mind and knowing when to use them can make product management smoother for everyone!
Read more“Experiments don’t fail, hypotheses are proven wrong”
With this Airbnb quote, Paul Rissen introduced our community to Experiment-Driven Product Development—or XDPD—a new approach that turns the spotlight on questions to be answered, rather than on solutions.
Improving your craft is a key skill for product and user experience professionals working in the digital era. There are many established methods of product development to inspire and focus teams—Sprint, Lean, Agile, Kanban—all of which focus on solutions to customer and business problems.
Within XDPD, discovery is a mindset, not a project phase.
Read moreProduct managers have been called ‘the CEO of the product’ by Ben Horowitz. While you may agree or disagree with that statement, product managers, like CEOs, make decisions that have a long term impact. Even after you moved to another job years ago, the decisions you made back then are likely to still affect the product and its users today.
With that daunting thought in mind, no wonder product managers like to use whatever data they can get their hands on to substantiate their decisions!
Read moreRoadmaps. And those problems that we seem to face again and again when creating them. I haven’t met a single product manager - including myself - who has not gotten a paw stuck in the countless traps that are luring just around the corner when setting out as a visionary. Luckily, there are ways to avoid those traps, if we keep aware of the forces - time pressure, expectations and investors - that will influence our decision making.
Read moreI see myself as a bridge between the models that I build and the business. There is a huge problem where data scientists are seen as data wranglers and not communicators. They sit in the corner and build a model and then have difficulty explaining the implication or how this is actionable in a clear way to the business.
Read moreGallup found 90% of people in Western Europe are not engaged at work. If their study was conducted in the early 1800’s, during the first wave of industrialization which pushed millions of people into unrelenting factory jobs, you might expect it. It was carried out in 2017, which makes it almost unfathomable given the billions spent on culture, leadership and engagement annually.
Read moreI suspect we might be reaching an inflection point in the evolution of content technology. We might be reaching the point where vendors stop pretending that servicing large web properties from a single CMS is a good idea, and instead they begin to embrace and even celebrate the idea of orchestrating content from multiple providers.
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