ProductCon Lessons from Monzo, Tripadvisor, DAZN, Adyen, Financial Times, Booking.com and Just Eat Takeaway
The key takeaways from ProductCon London 2024!
Hello 👋🏾 I’m Tino and welcome to this week’s edition of The Product Blueprint.
Each week I share actionable insights for how to build and scale a product that will positively impact the lives of your customers.
Today we focus on the key takeaways from ProductCon London 2024!
To get better at product, growth, strategy, and startups join other founders and product builders today:
ProductCon Schedule
Talk 1:Harnessing the Power of GenAI for Exceptional Product Outcomes with Joe Futty, VP of Product at Booking.com
Talk 2: Act Like an Owner, Challenge Like a VC with Fabrice des Mazery, CPO, The Fork at Tripadvisor
Talk 3: Cultivating Entrepreneurial Mindset in Product Management: Strategies for Success, Innovation, and Professional Growth with Millie Zah, Head of Product at DAZN
Talk 4: Relationship Counselling: From Disjointed Features to Product-First Thinking with Carlo Bruno, VP of Product at Adyen
Talk 5: Launching New Products In Companies Where It Matters Most with Debbie McMahon, Product Director at Financial Times
Talk 6: Revolutionising The Fintech Industry: The Monzo Way with Fernando Fanton, CPO at Monzo
Talk 7: Synergy in Leadership and Product Excellence: A Blueprint for Growth with Jessica Hall, CPO at Just Eat Takeaway
Talk 1: Harnessing the Power of GenAI for Exceptional Product Outcomes with Joe Futty, VP of Product at Booking.com
Key takeaways:
Talk Focus: The product opportunities created by GenAI
GenAI will have an impact on major areas of all businesses and requires new capabilities - the art of the possible is going to change
“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be” - Wayne Gretzky
We must think about what will happen in 6/12/18/24 months months. What will happen to what our customers expect?
It becomes important to revisit your customer journey and ask whether it’s as a result of the needs of your business or does it really reflect the unmet needs of your customer that could potentially be met now with a new technology
Is the paradigm flipping?
Today: Users are tasked to learn how to use our systems. We focus on making it as easy as possible to accomplish a task
Tomorrow: Systems that understand the users in their natural language. Dynamic environment encourages iterations to help best serve the customer need
Talk 2: Act Like an Owner, Challenge Like a VC with Fabrice des Mazery, CPO, The Fork at Tripadvisor
Key takeaways:
Double impact law: The reason the product org exists is to generate ROI for the user and for the company
We shouldn’t just be user-centric…we must be co-responsible for the economic success of our products by following three principles
Principle 1: The investment principle
Turn the time of the product team into into the right ROI, not code, not features and not impact
Transform stakeholders from clients to co-investors. The easiest way to do this is to get their input by pitching to them, not writing business plans. As part of your pitch you’ll talks about how to get access to customers, how testing will happen, the go-to-market strategy
The goal is to have co-responsibility for success AND failure
Principle 2: The capping principle
Capping = limiting the appetite considering the ambition
Imagine you’re using your own money to invest and you only have £1m, no more no less, you wouldn’t want to put all of that into one startup, you’d be looking to put less in different companies due to the level of risk. By doing so you’re de-risking the chance of losing all of your money
Capping applies to both discovery and delivery. We want to time-box how much time we spend doing these activities when de-risking and exploring options
The product trio caps the investment in de-risking the product
Principle 3: The portfolio principle
Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket, spread how product development time is spent
20-25% on low hanging fruit or enablers
60-65% on product initiatives for the near future
10-15% on bets to explore new horizons
Your portfolio may vary depending on
Market conditions and insights (dynamic allocation)
Your team’s appetite for risk
Company or product stage
Budget structure
Your own level of risk tolerance
Make product teams and stakeholders act like owners by taking responsibility for the effective use of resources and challenge like VCs by seeking maximum returns on their investments
Talk 3: Cultivating Entrepreneurial Mindset in Product Management: Strategies for Success, Innovation, and Professional Growth with Millie Zah, Head of Product at DAZN
Key takeaways:
Visionary thinking and future orientation
There’s power in blue sky thinking by considering what the future looks like
Schedule time away from your desk, take a walk and really think about what you’re trying to achieve
Be a user of your product and other products too. Analyse the things you like and don’t like that frustrate you. Innovation can come from conducting market research and gathering customer feedback. Think about what you can do to differentiate the business from competitors
Diversify your learning - look at what else is happening and what the emerging trends are. Identify market opportunities and anticipate industry trends.
Have fun with blue sky thinking. Don’t limit yourself.
Drive innovation and real impact through:
Creativity, experimentation and risk-taking
Sustainable long-term growth and profitability
Being brave and proactive
Build trust with stakeholders
Take initiative and ownership
Demonstrate value by find new ways to create and capture value and improving and evolving products
Make yourself the expert
Be good at storytelling
Transform ideas into memorable narratives by knowing who your audience is and what matters to them
When pitching as a founder, you aim for funding, whereas when pitching as a product professional you’re seeking buy-in and support
Unleash excellence through having a growth mindset
Have a routine to create habits and discipline
Challenge yourself inside and outside of work
Set SMART goals
Ask for feedback, don’t wait until it’s too late
Talk 4: Relationship Counselling: From Disjointed Features to Product-First Thinking with Carlo Bruno, VP of Product at Adyen
Key takeaways:
Talk focus: Dare to reduce complexity with example of how Adyen got the dynamic wrong for their goals & prioritisation and their ways of working and what fixes they applied to now benefit from a better relationship
It’s important to take a step back and be honest about how things are going - it’s a key step to becoming a product-first organisation
Goals and prioritisation
Disjoined Features (Before)
Too many OKRs - Adyen had 21
A complex north star metric
“Local” success metrics
Product-first thinking (After)
Few, more focused OKRs - Now they have 3
Prioritisation must hurt when ruthlessly stripping away the noise and focussing on the what matters most
“Global” success metrics
Ways of working
Disjoined Features (Before)
1:6 PM to engineers ratio
Too many meetings
“Launching” products by focusing on getting products off the ground
Product-first thinking (After)
1:8 PM to engineers ratio
End-to-end product management where previously they had 4 PMs managing different models which led to disjointed features to now having 1 PM covering those 4 ML models
“Landing” products so instead of focusing on getting a product off the ground, the focus becomes landing it at the desired location otherwise launching isn’t as valuable
Impact
As a result of these changes and adopting product-first thinking, Adyen unlocked value that was in front of them
1 + 1 = 3 when teams started working holistically as one
There needs to be a “Global” success metric that connects everything together
Disjoined Features (Before)
Isolated components and “greedy” behaviour
Local success metrics
Fragmented experience for customers and teams
Product-first thinking (After)
Unified offering
Customer-centric
End-to-End product management
Talk 5: Launching New Products In Companies Where It Matters Most with Debbie McMahon, Product Director at Financial Times
Key takeaways:
Launching a new product can sometimes feel like pushing a massive American fridge up a steep hill, even with a great team around you
Some people work in startups where launching new products is part of what they do, whereas some people work in big companies that have set themselves up well to do new things
Most people somewhere in the middle in companies with established product sets that are already doing well which can make launching something new a scary idea
80% of the work of launching a new product isn’t figuring out an idea or opportunity space, it’s actually everything around the idea that scares the business
What you need to launch your product
Find an idea that the org buys into
Build it in a way that meets customer needs
Launch it to real customers
Three big mistakes Debbie has learned
Not having a clear enough why - your product is not the strategy, say it in numbers.
Debbie and her team focused on leading with their product ideas (the edit) rather than what data they had seen and the opportunity they were going after
Do you understand why you and/or the organisation need to launch something new?
What is the wider strategy for the organisation that your new product will be part of?
Not listening
Are you listening beyond the questions you’re being asked?
Are you listening to what is underlying the question?
Who haven’t you spoken to?
Not nailing the team
Can the team reach out across the organisation?
But on the other hand, are there too many competing voices?
Talk 6: Revolutionising The Fintech Industry: The Monzo Way with Fernando Fanton, CPO at Monzo
Key takeaways:
Talk focus: The Monzo way
Development process for new products
Discovery - work from first principles “start from scratch” by conducting their own research and not looking at what others have done, they are not afraid to reinvent the wheel as long as it solves a problem for their customers
Build - Always in a constant dialogue with users. Meetings start with “what did our customers say and how do they feel”
Pilot - Test internally and sweat the small stuff by making sure features don’t reach customer hands without squads and company-wide testing
Growth - Capture signals, iterate and accelerate by combining quantitative and qualitative feedback
Starting from scratch
500+ bits of feedback for just one product every month from their community
In 2023 alone, their team wrote 172 research reports and spent 16 full weeks speaking to customers
3,000+ employees involved in staff testing
Through the Monzo way, they have launched:
Investments - Helps customers to build their financial future even if they’re never invested before
Home ownership - Identified key needs from their customer through 50 depth interviews and >2,500 customer survey responses
In-app call status - Aimed at tackling fraud. Customers can open their app and quickly check if the person they’re speaking to on the phone is from Monzo.
Talk 7: Synergy in Leadership and Product Excellence: A Blueprint for Growth with Jessica Hall, CPO at Just Eat Takeaway
Key takeaways:
Leading is not about a job title, it’s about the skills and attitude that you bring to your role
We are all leaders when it comes to building products e.g. leading problem solving, guiding teams and roadmaps, leading thinking, industries and change
Gaining different perspectives, experiences and trying different roles adds to your ability to become a better leader
What got you here, won’t get you there meaning you have to take control of your career and the next steps that you’ll take to continue growing and learning
You must be open about your personal ambition or else people will make assumptions for you (with the best of intentions)
Don’t be afraid to be ambitious
How to grow in your career
Reach out and find mentors who do the things you want to do, work in the areas you want to work in or can different perspectives on things
Pursue learning to cultivate skills
Taking a sideways move can be springboard for greater opportunities
And that’s everything for this week.
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