Workshops
September 12th 2024
Level up your product learning!
Alongside the main conference day, we’ve lined up four amazing interactive workshops, enabling you to deep-dive into new skills. Choose one of our carefully selected topics led by true experts in the field. We are currently still clarifying the workshop trainers and location for the workshop. Tickets will go on sale soon.
Tickets: Workshops are run in parallel so you can only attend ONE of them. Conference, workshop, and Leadership Forum tickets must all be purchased separately.
Workshop 1
Stakeholder Management: The Most Important Skill Nobody Teaches
To get your product funded and staffed, to get your team and your stakeholders aligned, to keep your customers and your executive sponsors engaged -- for your plan to have a chance, you’ve got to become the consummate leader.
Bruce’s workshop covers:
How to map the real org chart for your company
How to develop trust with key stakeholders
How to use narratives to drive alignment
How to say no in ways that enhance your relationships
How to make group decisions
How to main alignment in the face of change
Your Stakeholder Management Instructor - Bruce McCarthy
Bruce McCarthy and his Product Culture team help companies like NewStore, Camunda, Genomics England, Socure, Toast, and Kaleyra achieve their product visions through advising, forums, workshops, and private coaching.
He is President Emeritus of the Boston Product Management Association and a head judge at the annual Harvard Business School New Venture Competition.
Bruce co-wrote Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty and is currently working on a new book.
Workshop 2
Strategy and Principles: Connecting the Dots - SOLD OUT
Using the Decision Stack as a mental model to drive efficient and aligned decisions within your role, team, and organisation.
Workshop overview
The Decision Stack is a mental model which helps align organisations from top to bottom, and bottom to top – increasing decision-making velocity and quality throughout! Currently being used around the world in large complex organisations as well as fast-paced start-ups, this Decision Stack Workshop will help you connect the dots all the way from vision/mission through to every daily decision made in our companies. Leaders can make the necessary connections between existing theories around vision, strategy, and execution layers and understand how important they are to a cohesive approach. Individual team members can truly understand how their work connects to the bigger picture – and how to challenge their leadership where that clarity is lacking.
Using a mix of short lectures, hands-on activities, and group discussions, Martin Eriksson will teach you how to consider your full Decision Stack and deep dive into the two most challenging aspects: defining your strategy and defining your principles. Most importantly this workshop will help you understand your role in bringing these concepts back to your team in order to drive alignment and make better decisions.
What we’ll cover on the day
What is the Decision Stack – understanding it as a mental model
Defining Strategy and Product Strategy – understanding your role in defining strategy at any level of the organisation as well as practical tips for defining your product strategy
Product Principles – how they work and what they might help you achieve – along with practical activities to help you draft your principles
How to bring the product strategy and principles thinking back to your organisation – making a plan for working towards clarity within your team and the wider company
Key takeaways
How to own strategy at any level and how to help your team own strategy together
How to use principles to make and codify decisions
How to collaborate with your team to drive efficient decision-making in your organisation
Things to note
In order to make the most of this workshop we will be sending some simple pre-work questions to consider prior to the workshop
Please remember that strategy (company, product, or otherwise) is nuanced and complex. This workshop will provide some tools and ideas for you to get started, but you probably won’t walk away with a perfectly crafted strategy.
Your Product Strategy and Product Principles Instructor - Martin Eriksson
Martin Eriksson is a product leader, investor, speaker, author, and expert in product practices with over 25 years of experience building products and product teams in multiple markets and industries.
Martin has worked his way through the ins-and-outs of companies of various sizes, including The Financial Times, Monster (building the first SaaS offering there in 2004), Huddle, Covestor, and Cazoo. He literally wrote the book on Product Leadership, and he currently serves as the Product Partner at EQT Ventures, one of Europe’s top five venture capital firms.
As the Founder of ProductTank and Co-Founder of Mind the Product – together, the world’s largest product community that brings people together in 200 cities across the globe – he’s helped define an industry and shaped the practices of a generation of product managers.
Workshop 3
Product Management Leadership Essentials - SOLD OUT
Workshop: Audience is CPOs, VPs of Product, PM Directors and other product leaders who are directly managing teams of product managers (and perhaps designers or POs or analysts)
With a small group of your product leadership peers, we'll dig into tough organizational, economic, and executive-level issues. We'll share real-world experiences. We'll discover that most product leaders are wrestling with a common set of internal selling challenges.
Modules/Topics
What do product leaders do (versus product managers)?
Speaking the language of money with executives
Managing priorities and buy-in with stakeholders who don’t agree with each other
Constructing more productive and happier “maker” teams (product + engineering + design)
Merchandise product wins and communicate our teams’ value to the go-to-market side of the organization
Role-playing leadership challenges and HR/people issues
Your Product Management Leadership Essentials Instructor - Rich Mironov
Rich is a 40-year veteran of Silicon Valley product management, including six startups and 200+ consulting clients. Currently, he coaches product leaders, helps design software product organizations, and has parachuted into software companies 15 times as interim VP Products/CPO.
He been blogging about software product management since 2002 with a focus on real-world challenges and managing B2B executives. He launched the first product camps and his 2008 book "The Art of Product Management" was one of the first in the tech PM space.
Workshop 4
Essential Toolkit for Product Managers
This workshop is designed to give you the key techniques that you need in order to navigate the fast changing, complex environment of product management. We will cover essential tools that product managers need in order to excel in 4 key areas of product management.
1. Framing the problem
No team wants to build a product that no-one wants. Not only is this a waste of time and money, but it is a huge waste of precious human potential. We are prone to fooling ourselves into believing that we really do know what customers want. As a result, we spend most of our time adding new features, iterating on our products and blindly following product roadmaps that actually get us nowhere at all.
How might we avoid building things that no one wants?
2. Managing Demand
To succeed as a Product Manager you have to help your team focus. In an ocean seemingly full of urgent and important options, there will be some very high Cost of Delay opportunities. It’s all too easy to get distracted and confused – and miss the opportunity. You’ll have to handle demanding customers, under-pressure senior executives, impatient sales & marketing people, nervous investors and many others who want it all.
How might we utilise our team’s capacity to work on the most valuable ideas for our organisation? How might we manage conflicting priorities from multiple stakeholders?
3. Breaking Work down
Even when we know which outcomes we’re shooting for, there are hundreds of different paths we could take. And all of those potential journeys start with a first step. Breaking down work to small enough pieces improves flow and visibility and for this, you’re gonna need some sharp tools for slicing problems and solutions.
How might we decide which path to take and where to start so that we can deliver value to the customer early?
4. Forecasting and Roadmaps
Often, before the starting gun has even fired there are a bunch of people asking: “So, how much do you think this is going to cost? And, when do you think it will be done?”
How might we answer these questions and not make promises we can’t keep?
Key take-aways:
Understand at a deeper level what a product needs to do - jobs to be done
Prioritisation for pros using cost of delay
Tools for breaking work down
Basic forecasting techniques that will enable product teams to manage stakeholder expectations
Your Essential Toolkit for Product Managers Instructor - Özlem Yüce
Özlem (Ozzie) Yuce is the Vice President of Product at Zilch, where she plays a pivotal role in driving and implementing the product strategy, ensuring seamless delivery of value to customers.
A passionate and seasoned product management consultant, Ozzie leverages modern management principles to foster innovation within the intricate realm of product management. With over 15 years of experience, she has worked with a diverse range of organisations, from Fortune 500 giants to nimble Inc 5000 startups, influencing their cultures and driving improvements. Ozzie is a frequent speaker and workshop facilitator at product conferences, and she co-authored an IEEE paper titled ""Black Swan Farming,"" which explores the use of Cost of Delay in a Fortune 500 setting.
See our workshops in action
Our deep-dive workshops are taught by expert trainers in a safe space with your peers. This is a perfect way to dedicate a day to levelling up your product management skills.
→ See our 2023 Workshop Pictures (Workshops by Tim Herbig & Jeff Gothelf)
→ See our 2022 Workshop Pictures (Workshops by Christina Wodtke & Tim Herbig)
