Product 2019

DEC 31 TLV

Everyone loves data. Everyone loves talking like they understand data. Everyone loves using ML and AI buzzwords - but still, they are usually just throwing them out there into the open.

 Since the data world does not usually excel in explaining itself with nice user-facing UI, how can we show stakeholders what we are working on while presenting to a group that only sees the tip of the iceberg?

In this talk, Sarit will share from her experience how to build presentations for stakeholders that have the correct balance between HL concepts and explanations of specific ongoing data features. 

Re-platforming of 15 financial, mission critical, products using a new, micro service technology, while moving to the cloud, is not only a complex and fascinating technological challenge, but no less, a challenge of human interaction - bringing people onboard, managing conflicting agendas and smart interaction with stakeholders and groups across the organization.

In the talk, we will discuss how to achieve all this and live to tell the story.

Thought process and a few anecdotes on product innovation in a non-existent market

The product manager’s journey to find the product/market fit is akin to the Templars quest of the Holy Grail. Everyone wishes to find it, but nobody knows what exactly is it, where is it and how to start. Often this process is very “soft”, based on gut feeling, emotions, anecdotes, and a few conversations with customers. How then, in a world where PMs don’t decide what to have for breakfast without A/B testing their cereal, the decisions on the most crucial element of product strategy are made as a form of art?

In this session, we will discuss how the product/market fit can be discovered, measured, and improved upon using quantitative frameworks. How to use it to engage and convince stakeholders of the product strategy and specifically how to collaborate with the marketing, sales and customer success organizations to establish the required synergy to deliver a great product based on the newly-found and proven product/market fit.

Moving from being a services company to a product company requires huge change in how product team is working and what we own to increase our impact on the entire company.
We have taken several actions that enables us to have more influence to shift the company to be product oriented and be lead by product manager and not by sales or R&D.

Product Managers are required to manage multiple stakeholders, across functions yet sometimes apply a "one size" fits all to influencing. We will go through a basic stakeholder mapping framework, generalize about personas in an org and walk through how to apply different type of influencing skills to different types of stakeholders.

As a product manager, working effectively with the Sales and Marketing teams is essential. Sales and Marketing represent your channels to promote and sell your products in the market, but some Product teams can find this collaboration to be tricky. The language is different, incentives are different, the way the teams work is different. So how can you bridge those gaps? In this session we will go over real use cases and examples and provide pragmatic tips on how to overcome the natural challenges in this relationship over the course of  the product lifecyle.

Thought QA is the boring part of the product life cycle ? think again!

Come see why the word quality can be misleading and mean different things to different people in different products and how to truly define the quality level of your product in an agile manner.

Learn why the Product-QA relationship is a two way street, how a good QA will influence your roadmap and how a good product manager can become an excellent product manager by embracing a methodology of a “Product review” before each release.

Many companies have designed their codes and developed their products over five years ago, when AI was still associated with Spielberg’s “Artificial Intelligence”. To adapt with today’s growing demand for cost-effective data-driven products, these companies need to take their “old” product and augment it with AI and ML capabilities. This journey is a hell of a ride, which won’t leave the company with technological enhancements alone. Adding these capabilities requires a fundamental change in the mindset of people, their skills, and the way they manage their product, while bearing immense impact on the overall business and its value proposition.

I've worked in both product and marketing, and I've seen friction and tension between product at marketing at every single company that I've worked at. But it doesn't have to be that way! Product and marketing can get along and even make magic together - the key is very specific communication and alignment. During my talk I'll provide several examples that show how miscommunications and lack of alignment led to big problems, and how they could have been easily solved. 

The relationship between product and sales teams is often a highly tenuous one.  This is due to structural differences in vantage points and conflicting objectives. 

When it comes to machine learning based products, the challenge is even greater.

In this talk I will share, using examples, how by implementing the right processes, and maintaining a product strategy and implementation which is in sync with relevant stakeholders (sales, operations, marketing) we were able to overcome these challenges and turn them into productivity drivers.