Couldn’t Make it to INDUSTRY: The Product Conference? Crafted has you covered with 5 key takeaways
Last week, two Crafted team members joined fellow product managers at the Industry Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. The agenda was stacked with talks from prestigious thought leaders such as Marty Cagan, Dan Olsen, and April Dunford. Topics ranged from how to overcome common biases in decision-making to prioritizing focus and speed in uncertain economic times.
Additionally, our Head of Product, Laura Poatsy, led an industry group discussion on ChatGPT Prompts for Product Managers to discuss how they can best harness AI to become better PMs.
Here are five of our key takeaways from the conference:
We as PMs are at the forefront of AI. Not only can it help serve our users better through our product, but we can also leverage it to do our jobs better as PMs. We can leverage AI to:
Tackle the tedious, time-consuming tasks that fall to the bottom of our to-do lists
Analyze and synthesize quicker
Build lightweight prototypes and so much more
Oji and Ezinne Udezue emphasized that listening is learning. Customers are talking about your product whether you’re listening or not. Operationalize the ability to listen, synthesize, and act to improve your product and inspire your customers to be fans and advocates.
Avantika Gomes, Group PM at Figma, cautioned us to be aware of biases in our decision-making. Success as a product manager hinges on the ability to make good decisions. Confirmation bias, availability bias, and sunk-cost fallacy are common biases and can be overcome by cross-functional decision-making, objective inputs, and constantly challenging decisions.
Marty Cagan introduced his Product Operating Model from his newest book, TRANSFORMED. The Product Operating Model is his new name for “the difference between the best and the rest.” He reinforced through the 4 competencies of the model that the Balanced Team—or product trio—in addition to product leadership, is still best practice in the industry for shipping high-value, user-friendly products that drive business outcomes.
Focusing on what matters to increase speed to market is more important than ever before. Resources need to be used as efficiently as possible and speed to win, learn, and launch products is going to set organizations apart from the rest in these uncertain economic times.
Companies are being forced to update their business strategies at a pace we’ve never seen before. Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva shared a study that revealed the average time a business can be successful on the same business strategy changed from 75 years in the 20th century to six years in the present day.
We need to focus on consistently shipping lean slices of value to get products to market. Dan Olsen reminded us that being strategic means saying no or not now to ideas that aren’t directly aligned with your product strategy.
Interested in learning more product management best practices? From facilitating free solutioning workshops to product development consulting help, the Crafted team is here to share our expertise with you.