This February, Product School SF hosted an event called ProductCon. It featured some fantastic talks on a number of topics ranging from experimentation to cognitive biases to product-market fit. I’ve attempted to make it a little easier to digest these talks in bite-size pieces, and give some related materials for those who want to dig deeper.

A programming note: this article is broken into sections that correspond with the videos posted on Product School’s Facebook Page, and I reference the relevant timestamps at each header so that you can find them more easily in that section’s video.

Day 1, part 1

Leading Through Influence

by Tyler Odean — Director of Product at Reddit (8:48)

We’ve got a great article for you today.

The first talk of the day was a fantastic foundation to the ways that humans think, the way humans think that they think, and how we can think about the way humans actually think… with the ultimate goal of not having people think too much.

The crux of the talk is that there are all manner of cognitive biases that we, as flawed humans, exhibit every day in an effort to make the world easier to understand and navigate with minimal thinking. Tyler goes over some of our most common cognitive biases and how we can leverage them in our quest to build great product.

For example, when I said “We’ve got a great article for you”, I was attempting to leverage anchoring, your brain’s inherent tendency to overly rely on the first value that you come across.

There’s also some talk about Hitler and puppies that I found enumerating.

Tyler then goes over some great tips on how you can leverage these biases in a way that makes it easier to influence your way to having people agree with you.

Experimentation and A/B Testing

By Byron Jones — Director of Product Management at Optimizely (35:55)

How do you know that a product, or a product change, is successful or not? Different people, different places, different experiences, it’s impossible to control for all of the externalities that make it difficult to explain the story your data is trying to tell you. Experimentation is the only way to systematically determine the effect that your product is going to have.

Byron’s talk is centered around the idea of building a company culture of experimentation. He highlights some of the traits that companies exhibit once they’ve surpassed the “experimentation singularity”, the point where the importance of experimentation becomes well understood and supported within a company’s culture.

My favorite example was from how Netflix picks the right metric for their experimentation. Netflix has set out to build a product that optimizes for customer lifetime value (CLV), but they realize that they can’t wait for 29 months to see whether someone takes more or less time to churn as a result of an experiment. Ultimately, they turned to data science to predict user CLV based on short-term changes in behavior.

How to Crack the PM Interview

by Gayle McDowell — Founder/CEO at CareerCup (55:43)

“All of this advice on how to be a great PM is all well and good”, you’re saying, “but how do I go about getting a job where I’ll get to exercise my new mind-altering, product-experimenting superpowers?”

That’s where Gayle McDowell comes in. She’ll help you channel your unadulterated love for product into a compelling story that will get you hired.

A recruiter once told me “Software engineering interviews are formulaic. I can teach anyone to interview as a great coder. PM interviews are much fuzzier, it’s an artform”

Gayle goes into the fallacy of the “Perfect PM”, and highlights how you can determine what you need to highlight in order to come across as the right candidate for any given job.

Gayle tackles some of the potential pitfalls of the PM job hunt process — from resumes to interviews. Have you ever wondered how to respond to that “What is your favorite product?” question that you always get? Gayle will set you straight.

Day 1 part 2

The Only Metric that Matters

by Josh Elman — VP of Product at Robinhood, Partner at Greylock Ventures (00:00)

If you don’t know who Josh Elman is, I’ll just point out that seemingly every other speaker after him mentioned how amazing he is, and how honored they were to get a chance to hear him talk.

Josh’s talk is centered around how all of us product people should think about metrics. In order to make sure your product does what you set out for it to do, you need to measure that outcome. Josh sums it up quite succinctly…

Success is measured according to how many times your users perform a key behavior within an expected time cycle

Important to this point are concepts of key users, understanding churn, virality, and your user lifetime — all of which come together in Josh’s talk as vital components in the story of what impact your product has on the world.

User Research

by Ketan Nayak — Product Manager at Dropbox (28:21)

In this talk, Ketan highlights some of his philosophy on user research. A PM who doesn’t speak to users is missing out on one of their key responsibilities, and so understanding the importance of such research is foundational to building great product.

Ketan’s philosophy can be summed up as…

Empower People by Inspiring Empathy and Uncovering Truths

Each part of his philosophy can be examined separately. Empowering people to overcome needs requires an understanding of what your users’ needs really are, Inspiring empathy requires systematically communicating user problems in a way that can be easily understood, and uncovering truths means having a methodology of validating the many assumptions that go into designing great products.

My favorite part of this talk is Ketan’s succinct and easy-to-understand explanation of a Job-To-Be-Done, and how it differs from a User Story.

Day 1, part 3

The Lean Product Process

By Dan Olsen — Author of The Lean Product Playbook. (00:00)

What does it mean to achieve “product-market fit”? Oftentimes, this is a goal that entrepreneurs and product people state as a goal line for their early-stage product, but many have trouble understanding exactly where it is, or how to get there.

In this talk, Dan Olsen describes a product as having achieved product-market fit when that product fills the real needs of a target market. Going through the bottom 3 layers of the Product-Market Fit Pyramid (pictured above), Dan highlights the different steps product teams need to take in order to make sure that they’re building something that solves the right problems for the people you’re trying to target.

Ultimately, my favorite part of this talk was Dan’s discussion of the importance of discussing product innovation in terms of the problem space, rather than the solution space. This allows for teams to develop according to whether a problem is solved, rather than developing towards the realization of any single person’s idea of a solution.

Fintech Products

Amrit Pal — Product Manager at Square (40:52)

I’ll admit, I kind of skipped this one, since I’m not that big into Fintech, and so I’m going to ask that one of you write something! Email me a paragraph or two (jack@jackmooreproduct.com) and I’ll give you credit for it here.

Marketplace Product Management

Tal Flanchraych — Product at WAG (1:06:05)

Marketplaces make for incredibly complex products, Product is complicated enough when considering all of the difficulties in finding product-market fit with a single group of target customers.

Marketplaces, on the other hand, involve finding that same fit with multiple groups of users, as well as figuring out how to get the demand of consumers and the corresponding supply of providers in the same place. at the same time. at an acceptable cost to all parties involved.

In her talk, Tal gives what I can only describe as an elegant crash-course in building marketplace products. For all those who wake up with ideas of building the “Airbnb of such and such” or the “Uber of thisandthat”, this is the talk you’ve needed to hear for a while.

To say that Tal’s seemingly Electric-Avenue-themed slide theme isn’t my favorite part of this presentation should speak to the quality of the content. Tal runs through the particular metrics and operational concerns that come with marketplace products.

Diversity and Inclusion Panel Discussion

Moderator:
Laura Holmes. Product Manager at Google.
Panelists:
Gloria Lin. Product Leader at Stripe.
Evonne Johnson. Head of Product at Accompany.
Jackie Bavaro. Head of Product Management at Asana. Co-Author of Cracking the PM Interview. (2:10:00)

Unless you’re under the impression that heterosexual wealthy white males are the only market worth targeting with your product, diversity is something that you probably care about. In a world where users are diverse, product managers must be as well.

This panel discussion is a wonderful account of how diverse product managers are, as well as the value of diversity in product management. Diversity comes in many forms. The obvious ones like gender and ethnicity, which are incredibly important, but also some of the less obvious forms — such as backgrounds and ideologies.

The Evolution of the PM Career

Helen Sims — Product Manager at Airbnb (2:38:30)

What does a product manager do? With the time that I’ve been doing this, I’d expect that I’d be able to describe what a PM does in some elegant way. Alas, as I get to understand the role more and more, my notion of what a PM is capable of doing grows at a commensurate rate.

In that same vein, many wonder what the lifecycle of the Product Manager looks like. What is the difference between a Senior PM and an Associate PM?

Helen’s talk walks through the PM cycle, highlighting the metamorphoses that occur at each step, from the pupal Associate PM, struggling to find its way in the scary and multi-dimensional world of product, to the Majestic VP of Product, whose highly influential wingbeats can affect hurricanes of activity down the hierarchical change.

Thanks for reading! My name is Jack Moore.