On Nov 16th and 17th, 2016 I participated in the 4th Product Management Festival in Zurich, Switzerland. The audience for this event grew again. 450 participants from 26 countries confirm the increasing importance of product management in the industry. In this blog I will highlight a few topics.
Sharing experiences and learning from others is a major driver why product manager participate in this conference. They can learn a lot from good and bad experiences. Nick Jakobi – a product manager at Facebook – specifically focused on the bad ones. His talk: “How not to become a great product manager” provided numerous examples of things that did not work out well.
Harish Bhagatavulan from Oracle shared his insights about how to replace a set of legacy products with a new product. Applying standard techniques like product vision, definition and roadmaps is not enough. One needs to address the emotions and mindsets of people that are used to the existing products.
Jo Harris presented her work at The Telegraph; building a new authoring product for journalists of The Telegraph. The existing product was felt to be too cumbersome and time consuming. Intensive study of authors and documentation of user maps provided insights into the key workflow. They were able to reduce the time needed to author a new article by impressive 85%.
As a representative of the International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA) I had the opportunity to talk to a broad range of product managers about their current job context. A key issue in many companies are responsibilities of product managers. What do they need to care about and where to engage in or leverage from others work? This is especially important in relationships to UX designers, architects and marketing. ISPMAs reference architecture describes not only the core activities of SPM but also the relationships to other departments. That is why quite a few product managers took a visual memory of the framework with their mobiles at the ISPMA booth.
From left to right: Gerald Heller, Sabrina Cordes (iSQI) and Peter Lick (ISPMA) at the ISPMA booth.