Last week I
was able to attend the Mind the Conference for the first time. It is now one of
my favorite conferences of all time – I felt like I was with my tribe. It’s like ProductCamp but
exponentially bigger. I’ve come back jet
lagged and inspired. I’m motivated to
continue to learn, get better and to take some of what I learned and infuse it
into my day-to-day job as a product leader.
The
diversity of speakers resulted in a diversity of topics for the day. They ranged from the immediately actionable to
inspirational as well some good reminders of what we often already know but too
easily forget. Topics included Embracing Conflict, Learning to say
No, Rapid Prototyping, Story Telling and Product Failures. My favorite topic of
the day was by Kathy Sierra. Her talk
was inspired by her book BadAss Making Users Awesome.
It was a reminder that our products are supporting our users in a much
larger context. To support them we need
to help them find flow through challenges and to help them feel more like a
human being. It was about reducing
“cognitive leaks” and not making our users think about the wrong thing. My co-worker has a great post on this topic
and the overall experience for a user. This book is now at the top of my reading stack!
A theme
throughout many of the sessions is the concept of testing your hypothesis (your
problem statement), creating experiments, getting feedback and pivoting. Getting feedback throughout the process…not
waiting until the end. Most
organizations believe they’re practicing agile development but are only
applying it during the build process – this is something that needs to be
expanded throughout our processes. It’s
a great opportunity for us to get back to the basics of agile and take our
product teams to the next level. The speaker, Marty Cagan, posted about it after the conference - it's a great read.
Finally, my
favorite part was the people. The
networking was a-w-e-s-o-m-e. So many
great folks that were willing to share their ideas and what they’ve learned. I met many product people that I’ve been
reading their books/blogs for years.
This would be the equivalent of someone meeting Sandra Bullock (or for
me Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black fame) but for the product space. In addition to big names, it was so great to
meet product people across industries. I
met a product manager also navigating through ACA but for the education
space. Who would have thought? I can't wait to go back next year!
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