Panel: The conflict between commercial metrics and customer outcomes
Details
UPDATE: Please find the latest event description and panellists.
Panel Event: The conflict between commercial metrics and customer outcomes. How product managers can balance cultural challenges, managing metrics, and being a good human being.
What:
This is a special edition of ProductTank celebrating International Women’s Day, with a focus on values-based decision making in Product. We have a fantastic lineup of female leaders to explore this topic.
As technology and the landscape evolves we are seeing a growing conflict between delivering commercial outcomes and delivering value to and protecting the interests of customers. Performance metrics drive individual financial benefits, and so we can see this driving a tendency for leadership to focus delivery on organisational commercial value at the cost of service or product outcomes to the customer. Product Managers are directly part of the interface facilitating this and often have to struggle with the fallout of final decisions.
Recent examples include the recent conversations surrounding an insider leak about Uber’s alleged predatory approaches to maximising value extraction from vulnerable drivers to United Health’s AI claims processing resulting in huge failure rates in decisions, and widespread negative outcomes for health-compromised customers.
We will explore how to influence leadership, refocussing from reductive lagging indicators to nuanced leading indicators, and how we might sit with difficult decisions we might have to make.
This is a panel event featuring experienced voices from UX, product, design, and tech spaces. We'll keep the discussion interactive — bring your questions, real-world examples, or frustrations you've observed!
Format:
- Attendee arrival
- Start at 5:30
- Short panel intros + moderated discussion
- Audience Q&A
- Opportunity for networking, chats, and swapping stories over food & drinks
Who:
Whether you're a seasoned product professional or just starting out, this session offers a unique opportunity to gain valuable insights and expand your understanding of product management in diverse organisational environments.
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The Panel:
Marie Achour, Chief Product Officer @ Moodle
Marie is a product strategy leader with two decades of experience guiding global teams through transformation and delivering innovation at pace. Her career spans international roles across major financial institutions and leading technology hubs. Today, as Chief Product Officer at Moodle, she oversees the development of a platform that serves half a billion people worldwide, advancing equitable access to education.
Marion Burchell, Managing Director @ Azolla Holdings Pty Ltd
Marion is the Managing Director for Azolla Holdings Pty Ltd, a management consulting business focused on the confluence of strategy, innovation and technology. She was a consulting director for Monitor Deloitte’s Office in Perth. Marion was the Government Chief Information Officer for Western Australia, having been promoted from the executive director of policy and governance role. She had an extensive career in the public sector spanning several government agencies and sectors including, water, agriculture, social policy, intergovernmental relations, data and digital reform. Marion is the vice-chair of WAITTA, a Board member of a local tech company and is a senior associate at Intermedium.
Naomi Collett, Head of Product @ Healthengine
Naomi Collett is Head of Product at Healthengine and a member of the executive team. With over 18 years of experience across product management, growth strategy and digital marketing, she brings a commercially grounded yet customer-focused lens to building digital products. Naomi joined Healthengine nine years ago, starting in growth before moving into product leadership — a path that continues to shape her approach today. She leads a team of product managers across a broad portfolio of SaaS and marketplace products that support healthcare providers and touch millions of Australians each year. Coming from a growth background, Naomi has spent much of her career navigating the tension between short-term commercial performance and long-term customer value. She’s particularly interested in how product leaders can balance metrics, culture and outcomes — building products that are not only commercially sustainable, but genuinely improve people’s experiences. Over the past 12–18 months, Naomi has been leading Healthengine’s AI product vision. She’s excited about the role AI can play in improving access to healthcare, reducing friction for patients and providers, and unlocking meaningful impact at scale.
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A Special Thanks to Our Sponsors:
Thanks to Healthengine (https://healthengine.com.au/), Hatchd (https://hatchd.com.au/), Bankwest (https://www.bankwest.com.au/) and Pendo (https://www.pendo.io/) for sponsoring ProductTank Perth.
If you’re interested in speaking at, sponsoring, or hosting future ProductTank Perth meetups, drop us a line.
