Making World Product Day a Day to Remember [Mind the Product]

Last month, we celebrated the second annual World Product Day, uniting product people around the world for a day of reflecting on our craft. And while the cakes have been eaten, team activities completed, and gatherings wrapped up, we’re still hearing stories of the great conversations that took place throughout the day. We wanted to share a few of these stories from ProductTank meetups around the world.

Bringing the LatAm Product Community Together

By Mateo Fernandez, ProductTank Montevideo (Uruguay)

In Latam we coordinated three product communities in three different countries to host a remote live speaker. The one and only Teresa Torres spoke to 180+ product people at ProductTank San (Santiago, Chile), ProductTank Cor (Córdoba, Argentina), and ProductTank Mvd (Montevideo, Uruguay).

The attendees were thrilled about the multi-region event, and having Teresa live speaking to them.

“I didn’t know the product community was so big, it was cool to say hi to the other ProductTanks”

Teresa spoke to us about “The What and Why of Product Discovery”, and spent 15 minutes answering questions gathered from around our three regions.

Tel Aviv’s Special Sauce

By Moriya Kassis, ProductTank Tel Aviv (Israel)

The special sauce behind ProductTank TLV is the opportunity for product managers to not only grow as professionals but to thrive together. In product management, which sometimes feels like the loneliest job, this feeling is essential. World Product Day is an exciting opportunity for product managers to thrive together, both as professionals and as members of a growing community of product managers, all aim to bring the world better products, together.

Expanding Exposure to the Global Community

By Anna Gandrabura, ProductTank Odessa (Ukraine)

Odessa celebrated World Product Day by hosting a keynote speaker from Istanbul, Invertive founder Akar Sumset.

Akar gave a talk on the end-to-end approach, an approach which is achieved by integrating strategy, design, and execution. He outlined a five-step process that showed how strategy, design, and execution can be seamlessly connected, as follows:

• destination
• discovery
• definition and design
• development
• data and optimization

After the keynote, we had an informal fireside chat with Akar and the audience was really enthusiastic about asking questions. It was a truly great experience for our community to host a foreign speaker and to hold the event in English.

An Encore-Worthy Talk in Asia-Pacific

By Jase Clamp, ProductTank Brisbane (Australia)
It was fantastic to observe all of the product activity on World Product Day from my vantage point in sunny Brisbane. Auckland kicked off the day globally with Jeff Patton streaming in from California. Darius Wey, CPO for Sequoia-backed HealthEngine bravely agreed to fly the 10+ hours from Perth to Wellington ProductTank.  His presentation “Product in the Deep End” covered some valuable lessons he’s learned in the course of his career. Amanda Lam from Disney also make the hop from Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City to share with the group there.

Brisbane ProductTank was lucky to be hosted by SilverRail with a great view overlooking the river. Nic Smythe, General Manager at Thoughtworks Brisbane shared “lessons from over 15 years of building other people’s products”. Liam Casey, Head of Product for Flaik (a ski school platform), presented on “Design led or designer led: and other great ways to kill your business”. It was a candid talk about cutting through political hogwash and establishing a product design approach that is well aligned with organisational objectives.

Due to the unprecedented number of requests for slides, we decided to repeat Liam’s talk in August and also stream it live into the ProductTanks in Sydney and Melbourne. It was only a year ago that I, along with Meg Blake from Melbourne and Adrienne Tan from Sydney, collectively held our breath to orchestrate a live video greeting between our amazing cities – now we’re upping the ante with a full live simulcast. What brings me the most joy though is that we’re sharing our product experiences regionally so that we better equip our community to build products that people love.

See you Next Year?

Whether you celebrated with your own team, at a ProductTank meetup, or just engaged on Twitter, we’d like to say thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s World Product Day!

We’re already gearing up for next year, but you don’t have to wait that long to join the global product community! Check out your local ProductTank, join us for a conference or training, strike up a conversation on Slack, or chime in on #prodmgmt Twitter. There are product people all over the world ready to connect and help each other as we all strive to grow in our craft. And of course, we’ll see you next year for World Product Day 2020!

The post Making World Product Day a Day to Remember appeared first on Mind the Product.

Source: Mind the Product https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2019/06/making-world-product-day-a-day-to-remember/