Product Tank Lisbon - Second Edition

BIG UPDATE: The event venue will be Sala Amália @ CCB (Centro de Negócios - 2nd floor)! Amazing place with amazing guests for amazing Product People.

Hello there, as promised this next Product Tank will focused on Product Management and Product Methodology. With this said it's our pleasure to announce our two guests:

Arne Kittler, Director Mobile Product Management, Xing (https://www.xing.com/en)

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Arne has a background in interdisciplinary media economics and always considered himself a generalist who connects people (and dots). The first 11 years of his professional career he spent with digital creative agency FORK Unstable Media in Hamburg, consulting international brands & retailers such as NIVEA & OTTO.

In 2011 Arne joined XING, the leading professional network in the German speaking markets. Founded in 2003, XING is one of Germany’s biggest agile product organizations, meanwhile with over 30 product managers. Initially Arne was responsible for XING’s event & ticketing products. Since 2014 he is responsible for XING’s Mobile products – on one hand leading a team of Product Managers and Analysts in XING’s mobile platform teams, on the other hand managing company's change to become a truly mobile product organization.

As an active networker Arne has been an organizer of Product Tank Hamburg (https://www.xing.com/communities/groups/product-tank-hamburg-3170-1006005) since 2013 and will soon host a Product Tank (https://producttankmwc.typeform.com/to/oUpq6D) during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

"In my presentation I will share my personal learnings with two aspects of Product Management at XING:

Mainly I will talk about our approach to scaling mobile product management. Like many other digital companies started before 2010, XING’s approach to product management was strongly web-oriented and mobile had been treated as a by-product handled by a small silo of specialists. What we aim for today is a full-stack product thinking in which a product team not just owns the domain specific business logic and the web representation of their product, but also all other touchpoints and in particular mobile.

As a result we now build our native core apps as a distributed and collaborative effort of several teams. I will share my learnings from managing the change process of „unleashing mobile“ across XING and what it means for the product managers involved.

As a second topic I will dive deeper into one question which is closely connected to this distributed, collaborative approach: How to create the necessary alignment between autonomous teams?

I will present a framework for alignment which we call „Auftragsklärung“ (rough translation: „assignment clarification“ – I will explain why I prefer the German terminology). Auftragsklärung has helped to add a lot of clarity to the way we manage products and also be applied in other contexts such as start-ups or agency work."

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Job van der Voort, Vice President of Product, GitLab (https://about.gitlab.com/)

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With a background in neuroscience, Job joined GitLab after founding a startup and working as engineer at others. He spent a lot of time working with Fortune 500 companies to determine how to create a successful product and how to build a community of passionate engineers. Realizing his love for product excellence, Job focused his attention on making GitLab better and easier to use for everyone as the VP of Product. He is very passionate about working at a completely open company operating at the speed of a startup.

"At GitLab (almost) everything happens in the open. Feature requests, development, support, even organisational things happen in the open. When developing an open source project, with a community of over 100,000 organisations, it's not easy to still release regularly and stay focused on your vision for the product. In this talk, I'll discuss how we opened up (almost) everything and talk about the challenges we faced while doing that. I'll go into the advantages and disadvantages of working in the open and specifically on how to maintain a vision and keep shipping, while accepting contributions from a community.I'll also discuss how we keep shipping new features with every single release, combining feedback from customers and community. "