Building great products requires us to consider our people, processes, and products.

At this three-day mini-conference, learn how others create, nurture, and grow best-in-class product teams that build products that matter, together. Whether that’s building diverse teams, finding the right structure, empowering your teams to do their best work, moving from outputs to outcomes, or effectively collaborating with one another – we have you covered!

We’ve focussed the days with short half-hour sessions that leave you time to balance event attendance with your work day. Come join us and gain valuable product learnings, meet others, and head back to work feeling inspired and ready to put into action what you’ve learned.

Our speakers

• Erica Jenkins (CPO at Crayon)
• Sheeri K. Cabral (Senior Product Manager, Lineage at Collibra)
• Nicole Daines (Director of Product at Rosie)
• Marily Nika (AI Product Lead at Meta)
• Melanie McKay (Head of Product at notonthehighstreet)
• Stephanie Leue (Director Product, Scheduling at Doodle)
• Adam Thomas (Lead Product Manager at SmartRecruiters)
• Emily Patterson (Director of Product Management at Fortress Information Security)
• Elsawy Yehia (VP, Product & Design)
• Saielle DaSilva (Director of User Experience at Cazoo)
• Nate Jones (Head of Product at Palolo)
• Ronke Majekodunmi (Senior Product Manager, Large Enterprise at PayPal)

Agenda

Here’s what we have planned for you:

Day 1 – May 31

8:00am PT

Erica Jenkins

CPO at Crayon

“Missed” Alignment: Top 3 Mistakes Product Teams Make and How to Fix Them

All too often product management and the rest of the company are misaligned. Roadmaps don’t clearly define customer value, customer success isn’t prepared to handle new releases, marketing campaigns don’t overlay with the product offering and sales isn’t selling the solution to the prospect’s problem. Sound familiar? Erica will break down three common challenges and offer tactical solutions to unlock your product team’s influence across your company. The session will cover effective communication of the roadmap, release readiness and how to tap into competitive intelligence to inform your product strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a team of one or a team of many, product management is the “hub” to the “spokes” of the business!

8:30am PT

Sheeri K. Cabral

Senior Product Manager, Lineage at Collibra

Getting to No: Tactics and Scripts to Stay Close to Your Path

Whether you’re trying to get alignment on goals, strategy, tactics; or stick with them during quarterly planning, daily standups, and when urgent items come up – you need to be able to recognize which ideas will lead you astray, and be able to resist them, while growing and maintaining good relationships. This talk addresses the tough work of being able to execute your plans effectively. Attendees will learn how to figure out what to accept, delay and reject, as well as learn several scripts of how to reject and delay ideas without destroying trust and goodwill with stakeholders and customers

9:00am PT

Nicole Daines

Director of Product at Rosie

Building a Successful Product Organization and Winning the Trust of Your Stakeholders

Nicole will share her experiences being on the front lines of product reorganizations and digital transformations. In her current role, she is leading the reimagination of her product organization and working to stand up a strong organization by prioritizing stakeholder buy-in. She’ll share what’s worked for her, what (embarrassingly) hasn’t worked, and leave you with actionable takeaways leaving you feeling empowered and motivated to tackle the challenges you may be facing in your org, while building strong allies in the process.

9:30am PT

Marily Nika

AI Product Lead at Meta

Bringing AI Products to Life

Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the world of business. It is (re)defining industries, the workplace and also our day-to-day lives. What does AI mean exactly? How do Product Managers leverage AI technologies in order to build impactful products? What are the differences between a traditional Product Manager and an AI Product Manager? Marily will talk about her path to AI, Computer Science and Product Management, and she will provide a crash course on AI Product Management with examples from products we use on a day-to-day basis.

Day 2 – June 1

8:00am PT

Melanie McKay

Head of Product at notonthehighstreet

How to Really Collaborate with Those Around You

Like many others, Melanie believes wholeheartedly in collaboration is key to building the most successful products. But what does this actually mean? And how do you do this in the real world? Melanie will share some of her back-to-basic tips with some real-world examples on how best to drive collaboration throughout the product development process while making sure you don’t find you’re stuck in a world where every decision is made by a committee.

8:30am PT

Stephanie Leue

Director Product, Scheduling at Doodle

Set your product team up for success

How can leaders assist their teams in becoming high-performing and effective product builders? This session will introduce you to four pillars that will assist you in developing a clear vision for the future of your product teams, as well as how to apply the aspects in your everyday work to nurture a high-performance culture.

9:00am PT

Adam Thomas

Lead Product Manager at SmartRecruiters

Strategy Custody

What happens after you build a strategy? If you aren’t careful – it can end up just a piece of paper that no one references. Much like a tree that falls in the forest, what happens if it doesn’t make a sound? This is why Strategy Custody is important. How your strategy travels and affects the people who are affected by it is the difference between an alive strategy, and a dead one. In this session, we will talk about the difference between dead strategy and alive strategy, and how you can maintain high strategic custody to affect the decisions around you.

9:30am PT

Emily Patterson

Director of Product Management at Fortress Information Security

Purposefully Build a Diverse Product Team

During the summer of 2020, tech companies almost unilaterally published diversity and inclusion statements. Did your company make any changes? Do most members of your product team (still) look alike? Product teams are especially prone to hiring the same “type” of person – we are all more comfortable working with people who remind us of ourselves, and product management skills are some of the hardest to assess during the interview process. But studies consistently show that teams with diverse backgrounds perform better – they catch problems earlier and produce more robust products. So how can you pivot your team toward diversity? If you’re a hiring manager or part of an interview panel and you are looking to diversify your product team, you need to be purposeful. There are small steps you can take to make your team and company a better fit for underrepresented backgrounds in tech. We’ll cover some key elements to implement and why they make an impact. Start treating your product team like a product and work through this backlog of advice – hire entry-level or career change product talent, implement a standardized career ladder with salary bands, offer ongoing education and cross-training opportunities, and reach out to and recruit from underrepresented groups. Be as thoughtful about your product team hiring as you are about your product analytics and watch your teammates (and products!) flourish.

Day 3 – June 2

8:00am PT

Elsawy Yehia

VP, Product & Design

The Guide

People or product; what comes first? In this talk, you’ll learn how product leaders invest in making their people better thinkers and makers empowered to create a positive impact for their customers and organizations.

8:30am PDT

Saielle DaSilva

Director of User Experience at Cazoo

Getting to Regenerative Design

While we build products around personas, there are plenty of reasons why product managers should be looking at the bigger picture. In this talk, Saielle DaSilva talks about moving beyond human-centered design. Focusing on one persona helps product managers think about their customers, but it also limits their understanding of what else is out there. Human-centered design has put us in a place where we look at just the individual transaction between a single person and a company. Unfortunately, when product managers do this, they are missing out on product strategy and opportunities as well as the environmental and ethical impacts of the products they’re designing.

9:00am PT

Nate Jones

Head of Product at Palolo

Product Quagmires & How to Get Unstuck

Ever gotten stuck in a product development quagmire? Your senior stakeholders won’t align. Your engineering team’s estimates are wildly off from the cadence sales needs. Your feature set doesn’t quite live up to the experience you wanted to unlock and you’re still having trouble delivering. What do you do next? In this talk Nate will deep dive into the quagmire problem, walk you through the types of quagmires product leaders often encounter (no pun intended), and lay out some hard-lived strategies on getting yourself unstuck and living to fight another day!

9:30am PT

Ronke Majekodunmi

Senior Product Manager, Large Enterprise at PayPal

Design Driven Leadership

The very essence of leadership is creating a space that enables our teams to dream big, imagine and bring what was once unthinkable to live, thereby changing humanity, that is innovation. For any product to be efficacious, it starts with a product leader who sees themselves as a problem manager who can contribute unique value, sort out problems and provide solutions thereby making their customers happy and improving their lives. To solve these problems not just for today but in the future as well requires innovativeness, imaginativeness, and ingeniousness. Creating, and nurturing a design-led culture will unlock creative concepts, ideas, and intellectual bravery. This is how we build best-in-class products.

Can’t make it or can only join for part of the time?

Register and we’ll ensure you will have access to the recordings and takeaways.