May 2022, San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts — over 2000 in-person attendees at Product Con 2022. It’s good to be back in person at a product conference!
Product Con is a conference organized by Product School, a company focused on education for product managers. They built a great community and have a lot of resources if you want to grow your PM skills.
The conference included talks from PM leaders from companies such as Disney, Atlassian, Cruise, and Salesforce. There were excellent talks on product-led growth (PLG), the evolution of product management, how to innovate through deep customer empathy and rapid experiments, and more. Here is the link to all the talks.
I especially loved two talks. The first one was from Heidi Gibson, VP of product at Typeform — she focused on building great teams through empathy, curiosity, and bravery. Ajay Arora, SVP of product at Disney, gave the second talk I loved — he focused on humility, failure, and dissent. Read below for the details.
Palace of Fine Arts — San Francisco
Building Inspiring Teams
Heidi Gibson, VP of Product at Typeform
Heidi talked about a subject that’s near and dear to my heart — how to build great product management teams.
She postulated three major things that are needed to build a great team culture:
Lead with empathy
Be curious
Be brave
On empathy, one interesting point she made was to think about executive empathy — what do they need? Realize that they know less about the problem you’re working on than you do. Realize they don’t have time. Realize they trust you — and don’t care who did the work.
Curiosity drives research, insights, and customer and market understanding. It brings teams together and makes you happier. One interesting tidbit — curiosity naturally drops off after 6 months at a new job — so you need to actively feed it.
Finally, bravery is about calling out what’s not working and taking a proactive stance. Admit mistakes and volunteer your team for the most impactful and also hardest tasks.
As a recipe for implementation she recommends thinking about the motivations, fears and needs for each person in your team. Then apply the same for you and your stakeholders. Rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 5 for empathy, curiosity and bravery. Make a plan and practice, get better at it.
Thank you Heidi!
The Most Underrated PM Virtue
Ajay Arora, SVP of Product at Disney
I LOVED Ajay’s talk. Final presentation of the day and he got the place rocking.
What is the most underrated PM virtue? It’s humility.
Why is that important? Because we are all wrong. A LOT. Ajay gave great examples from his own career at Audible/Amazon (immersive reading first being a failure then ultimately becoming the Whispersync feature) and Netflix (new pricing structure in India, initial flop followed by a success story through increased retention).
How exactly do you build humility? Here’s what Ajay recommends:
First, present humility
Show the failures (a good example is the the anti-portfolio list from Bessemer Venture Partners — they missed out on a lot of great companies. Also invested in a lot of great ones.)
Build a culture of experimentation — 9/10 experiments fail
Then, prepare to fail
Perform a pre-mortem — get everybody in the room, tell them the project has spectacularly failed. Each person needs to write down the reasons why it did. Once you have the list, build a plan to reduce risk. I love this idea.
Promote dissent
Encourage others to poke holes at your plans, ask the “WHY” question. Strategy plans need to be shared and commented upon. This assumes there is trust in the team and that everybody has a voice.
Thank you Ajay!
Wrap-up
In conclusion, here are a few parting thoughts
I highly encourage you to attend in-person product conferences. You should be investing in your PM growth and live conferences are great for it. You are in the moment, focused on the presenters, learning at 100%. As an added bonus, you get to network with your tribe .
I plan to follow Heidi’s recipe for building great teams — empathy, curiosity, bravery. Assess myself, talk to my team about it. Get better at all three.
Finally, talk to my team about humility. Openly talk about our failures and the lessons we’ve learned. Share strategy and product plans widely and have everybody ask questions. And of course, run a lot of Pre-Mortems. My first one is scheduled for this week 😁.
I hope to see you at a conference soon!