We’re running our first mini-conference for our Product Makers community. The theme is Growing Strong Product Makers. Over these few short days, we have some great speakers sharing their expertise on a variety of topics that can help you be a better product maker whether you are a PM, product leader, or collaborating with others working in product.

We’ve focussed the days with short half-hour sessions that leave you time to balance event attendance with your workday. 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.

Agenda

Here’s what we have planned for you:

Day 1 – Sep 22

8:00am PT

Lisa Mo Wagner

Strategic soft skills for PMs

You 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. Let’s talk about how to become the most successful product leader while balancing stakeholder, team member and customer needs.

8:30am PT

Adam Thomas

Leveraging cognitive bias in product – our meetings are broken, but they don’t have to be.

We don’t see the world as it is, we’re living in a world of perspective. Sometimes, this is a good thing, as it will allow us to make decisions using our “gut.” Other times, that doesn’t work – and can lead to product teams being stagnant for quarters at a time. Where we get trapped? Cognitive Bias. I’ll go over three common forms of cognitive bias and how it effects the product battle ground, meetings. Leave here with some tools to make meetings work for you and your product goals and a little less “stuck time.”

9:00am PT

Matt LeMay

How defensiveness kills collaboration

Product management is unrelentingly difficult work, and often leaves us feeling like we are playing a non-stop game of defence–whether that means defending our decisions, defending our teams, or defending our individual contributions to those teams. And yet, the moment we take a defensive posture, we often wind up harming the very things we seek to protect. In this talk, author and coach Matt LeMay will explain why staying off the defensive can make product management both more effective and more enjoyable, and shares some practical advice for staying open and curious through your most challenging moments.

9:30am PT

Dan Olsen

How to define a winning product strategy

For many product teams, Product Strategy can be a mysterious black box. Few companies have a clear, cohesive strategy for how their product will win in the market. In this talk, product expert Dan Olsen will use frameworks from his book The Lean Product Playbook to teach you a simple but effective approach to defining your product strategy. You will learn how to focus your strategy on customer needs instead of features, the Kano Model, and the Product Strategy Matrix. Dan will illustrate the concepts with real-world case studies.

Day 2 – Sep 23

8:00am PT

Eileen Wang

Nurturing product makers among cross-functional partners

When the PM is the only participant driving product development decisions, untested assumptions can easily derail the entire roadmap. Eileen will discuss how to inspire cross-functional partners like engineering and design to invest in exploring a problem space, and anticipate needs & risks during the development process. A PM doesn’t need to know it all, but should learn how to ask good questions to inspire curiosity, nurture co-ownership, and empower the team to discover unknown unknowns.

8:30am PT

Priya Bhatia

Using experiments to accelerate product growth

Peter Thiel wrote in his book, Zero to One, “Poor distribution, not product, is the number one cause of failure.” And strong product distribution requires a growth focus! Product growth is a dominant factor in a startup’s success story as it helps unveil user habit loops which in return lead to discovery of growth flywheels. Experiments are a tool that draw you closer to uncovering the user psychology and growth flywheels. Learn more about how to run growth experiments, characteristics of a minimal viable test and pitfalls to avoid when analysing results of your experiments.

9:00am PT

Michael Park

From Zero to 6 product teams in 24 months

Over the past 24 months as the VP of Product at BombBomb, I fell upward more often than not while building collaborative product teams. In this 30-minute session, I will cover my key learnings in the human category: hiring + attriting, coaching + missing moments that matter, building + planning for growth.

9:30am PT

Neeraj Mathur

Product and design: how best to collaborate

Product Management is a collaborative role. Delivering a valuable and delightful product requires coordinating and collaborating with multiple departments and stakeholders – particularly, User Experience. PMs and Designers need an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the end-user. Sometimes this overlap leads to tensions. Join this session to learn how PMs and Designers can effectively collaborate and deliver quality products that wow the users every time.

Day 3 – Sep 24

8:00am PT

Moe Ali

Using user psychology for product growth

As humans, we make decisions emotionally and justify them rationally. It turns out, that although we think we are rational human beings, user psychology plays a big part in getting our users to take the actions we want. When used ethically and responsibly, Product Faculty’s Decision Scale framework can be a powerful tool in growing your product.

Can’t make it? Don’t fret. We’ll have recordings available post-event as well.