Happy New Year - ProductTank January

Vision: Inspiring Teams - By Keela Robison

One of the most important responsibilities of a product leader is to communicate and reinforce the product vision and purpose: why your product matters. The competition for talent is fierce, and vision and purpose attract and retain top performers. When properly communicated, vision enables your team to act autonomously. The challenge is that individuals have differing learning styles: some want data & facts, others want to hear stories, while others prefer hands-on projects to find inspiration. In this talk, we'll discuss what constitutes an effective vision, and review dozens of creative ideas to reinforce vision, strategy, and goals with your team.

Keela's Bio:

Keela is Founder & CEO of PM Loop, a startup offering online training for technology business professionals. Prior to PM Loop, she was CEO of Urbanspoon, a top-500 consumer mobile app and website with over 30 million monthly customers that she sold in Q1 2015. She has held product leadership and executive positions at T-Mobile, Amazon, and RealNetworks. Keela received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Stanford University, and now lives in Seattle. She is an instructor in the Berkeley Product Management Certificate program, and shares product best practices at @pm_loop or fb.com/pmloop.

Using lean product management to drive aggressive growth - By Josh Furnas

When expectations are high, teams have to de-risk big moves and find ways to consistently deliver big wins month over month. Engineering resources are scarce and time is limited. Josh uses lean principles in design & engineering sprints to make sure our engineers are building valuable products, and the team is driving monetization metrics.

In this talk Josh will share his experiences of how his team takes on big product problems through small iterations, splitting time between conversion rate optimization and testing large product features in bites. He'll share his far from perfect but ever evolving experimentation process that led to a tripling of revenue the last 1 1/2 years, frequently surprising the CEO with entirely new experiences and answering his prodding Q's "oh that?, that increased revenue 10% and users love it."

Josh's Bio:

Josh Furnas is the Lead Product Manager of the Monetization team at Credit Sesame, a fin-tech startup helping people understand their debt & credit. Josh joined the team 1 1/2 years ago as a vertical specific, Consumer Loans PM and has..iterated...himself through larger roles. Previously he had co-founded the social enterprise Selfless, helping non-profits fundraise through fashionable apparel. Out of college Josh co-founded a high end deli / country store on the Vermont border, the Big Moose.