Takeaways from Product at Heart in Hamburg
Last week I attended Product at Heart together with a few of my colleagues. There were some really interesting talks and I wanted to share my main takeaways from the conference.
Cross-functionality stretches beyond your team
Melissa Perri opened up the conference with her talk on Product Operations. She repeatedly came back to the importance of cross-functional relationships. Most discussions on cross-functionality focus on how you should work within a team. As a PM it’s important to remember that you operate across the organisation and you need to nourish your relationships with Sales, Marketing, Compliance and other departments. Niamh Jones came back to this and also mentioned the importance of speaking a language that your audience understands and answering the right questions at the right time. Don’t fall into the trap of going on and on about product management theories if you’re talking to a CFO who is mainly interested in numbers and efficiency.
Understand your company
Another topic that was brought up by several speakers, including Bruce McCarthy, was the need for PM:s to understand the company they are operating in. Not all companies are digitally native, like a Spotify or Netflix, and may be more sales- or finance-driven. You need to understand this in order to help guide your team in the right direction and provide your stakeholders with the right insights and data. Bruce talked about it from a stakeholder-perspective and that’s a subject we’ve continuously talked about with the clients we coach. You need to be transparent and provide the information with insight on how your team is performing, why you’re doing what you’re doing and the impact you believe it will have.
Models and processes can only take you so far
A point which definitely relates to the takeaways above, is what Emmi Meurling talked about. She talked about the importance of compassion and using that mindset when you’re communicating. Early on in her career she focused more on “the right way of doing things” rather than fulfilling the needs of her colleagues. Being a compassionate PM means communicating in a transparent fashion which doesn’t waste peoples’ time. A concrete example could be to communicate the launch of a new feature on Slack in a manner which is concise and easy to understand.
Tim Herbig deep-dived into this topic and talked about “alibi progress”, defined as prioritizing correctness over value. Doing OKR:s because Google are using them is not good enough. We need to think about our practices in the same way we think about our products. Define why we need to do them, for whom and what we think we’ll achieve. This is a great way to adapt the mindset we already have in ways to create more buy-in and confidence from the rest of the organisation.
Curiosity is key
My final takeaways was brought up by many speakers, including my personal favourite, Oliver Reichenstein, which is the need for curiosity. Emmi and Bruce talked about it in the context of stakeholders. Spend the time to get to know them, to better understand what’s behind their point of view. In the process you’ll both create empathy for your stakeholders and also move the discussion from the solutions they want implemented to the problem they’ve identified on their end. Oliver talked about Maker’s Knowledge, a concept that dates back to the 17th century and where the main idea is that you can only truly understand something if you’ve built it. You don’t need to adapt this mindset literally to all of your product practices but it does help you stay curious and find new angles to the problems you’re trying to solve.
All of the talks were recorded and we’ll post our favourite ones on our Linkedin page when they are published so make sure to follow us there.
