Product Aotearoa Conference 2023
Join the movement that's shaping the future of product management. Don’t miss this golden opportunity to learn, connect, and grow.
Bruce McCarthy
Stakeholder Management: The Most Important Skill Nobody Teaches
Bruce McCarthy and his Product Culture team help companies like NewStore, Camunda, Genomics England, Socure, Toast, and Kaleyra achieve their product visions through advising, forums, workshops, and private coaching. He is President Emeritus of the Boston Product Management Association and a head judge at the annual Harvard Business School New Venture Competition. Bruce co-wrote Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty.
To get your product funded and staffed, to get your team and your stakeholders aligned, to keep your customers and your executive sponsors engaged — for your roadmap to have a chance, you’ve got to become the consummate leader.In this talk, Bruce McCarthy walks you through his process for gaining and maintaining alignment within your team, among your stakeholders, and across your organization.Successful product leaders are:
- Persuader – someone who understands their audience and homes in on the most relevant factors to influence a certain direction/decision
- Translator – someone who speaks the languages of the customer, the business, and technology
- Diplomat – someone who helps people see their own interest in collaboration
- Cheerleader – someone who make everyone feel important and involved
- Negotiator – someone who helps reconcile the irreconcilable
- Therapist – someone who listens with a genuine desire to help
- Poet – someone who paints a vivid picture of a future where we all benefit
Rich Mironov
The Chocolate Cake Problem: Not Letting Stakeholders Own Your Roadmap
Rich Mironov is a 40-year veteran of Silicon Valley product management, including six startups. He coaches product leaders, helps design software product organizations, and sometimes parachutes into software companies as the interim VP Products/CPO. He been blogging about software product management since 2002, wrote “The Art of Product Management” and is thrilled to return to New Zealand.
Talk Description:
In my experience, internal stakeholders never actually align on their priorities or demands. They are also constantly adding “small” things to their lists of urgent work. How do we understand the underlying behavior patterns, and can we avoid having stakeholders own the roadmap?
Para Muraleedharan
From Napkin Sketches to Product Revenue: a guide to Product Commercialisation
My prior experiences were with MATTR and Xero where I was a Commercial Portfolio Manager and GM of Product respectively. I am passionate about building strong product teams and delivering a measurable impact to our customers and to our business.
Talk overview:
“From Napkin Sketches to Product Revenue: a guide to Product Commercialisation”
Apply a systems thinking view to turn raw ideas into profitable products. Discover the key ingredients that fuel commercial success, from understanding customer needs to navigating market dynamics Learn some tips to decode the language of finance, develop pricing strategies, cost architecture and optimize monetization models to maximize your product’s growth potential.
Norie Ape
Unleashing the Power of Cognitive Diversity: Building Teams for Enhanced Innovation
Talofa lava everyone, I’m Norie Ape a Samoan born, Auckland raised and now Wellington based Digital Product Manager at Te Pūkenga where I focus on utilizing design thinking, data story-telling and cognitively diverse teams to enable positive outcomes for vocational education in Aotearoa (New Zealand) with priority groups including Māori, Pasifika & disabled learners. Outside of my Tech Explainerer role at Te Pukenga I’m a passionate advocate on diversifying the technology talent pipeline in Aotearoa and in particular increasing the number of Māori and Pasifika wahine in technology in Aotearoa where overall women make up 23% of the Tech Sector, overall only 4% are Māori & 2.8% Pasifika. With experience in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors I focus on ‘using tech for good’ but also on raising awareness on digital equity challenges in Aotearoa while connecting with other wahine in Tech across Aotearoa & in the Pacific to connect, celebrate and collaborate and key issues and challenges.
Talk overview:
“Unleashing the Power of Cognitive Diversity: Building Teams for Enhanced Innovation”
Building cognitively diverse teams can lead to improved product teams and foster innovation in organizations
- Understanding cognitive diversity
- Creating a foundation for building cognitively diverse teams
- Leveraging Cognitive Diversity to Cultivate Product Talent
- Nurturing a Vibrant Product Talent Pipeline through Cognitive Diversity
- Overcoming Challenges and Ensuring Sustainable Success
Andrew Tokeley
Practical Product Strategy - beyond the theory, actionable insights for everyone
Andrew (Tokes) Tokeley is New Zealand’s only full time, independent, Product Leadership Coach. Since founding his business in late 2017 he has coached over 35 senior product leaders and worked with more than 60 product companies across NZ and Australia. Tokes has been involved in product leadership before he, or anyone else in New Zealand, even knew what it was! In 2009, he joined Xero as their first product leader, where he built a world class product team that was critical in growing and supporting a customer base that grew from 17K to over 560K in only six years. He later moved from accounting to holograms as the Global Head of Product at 8i. Tokes founded New Zealand’s first ProductTank Meetup in Wellington back in 2015, now boasting over 2600 members and one of the most active business user groups in the city. In addition to product coaching and advisory work, Tokes is an Operating Partner for Movac, supporting portfolio companies in Fund 5.
Talk overview:
A lot of things have been written about the theory of product strategy. It can all feel a little abstract at times, so this talk is for anyone looking for practical advice to help them define, align and improve their own strategies. The goal of the talk is to provide everyone with at least one thing they can use immediately, even if they’re not creating a product strategy themselves.
Tanya Johnson
Building products you won't regret. An approach to responsible Tech and AI for product teams.
Tanya has worked in product teams for 20+ years, with leadership roles spanning across strategy, product management, design, and software development. Specialising in high growth fast-scaling technology and SaaS companies, Tanya strives to create diverse team environments – championing the development of innovative products that reflect our communities. Tanya leads multiple teams in her role as Chief Product Officer at Auror, and is responsible for its ethical product development focus. Tanya understands the pivotal role software plays in minimising the harm to marginalised communities, and draws on her significant experience in tech and SaaS to navigate this path. A champion of women’s and LGBTQ+ voices, Tanya is the founder of the well-known organisation NZTech WomeNB (formerly Women in Tech), advocating for greater visibility, voices, and roles for women and non-binary people in the wider tech industry.
Talk overview:
When building software products, companies run the risk of propagating societal issues at scale not out of malice or bad intent, but because the most worn pathways often fail to consider these. How do we use diversity, dissent, and deliberate practice to improve the products we build and the impact they have on the communities we serve? In this talk, Tanya Johnson walks you through Auror’s Responsible AI + tech framework for evaluating and building features responsibly, leaving you with tools to take back to your own teams and implement successfully – no matter the size of your organisation.
Nicole Williams
Reframing Failure: Creating a Culture where Learning Fast is Celebrated
Nicole is an experienced product leader. She’s currently Head of Product at Trade Me, where she leads the vision and strategy for their Marketplace. It’s the perfect environment for her endless curiosity and appetite for gnarly customer problems. She’s previously worked across product and marketing for open source software, platform technology and hardware. Her passions are learning and helping others grow.
What if telling your stakeholders you were wrong was met with applause? What if the cost of learning you were wrong was hours or days, not months? How would this change your product approach? Head of Product Nicole Williams will share Trade Me’s journey to reframe failure by celebrating learning fast and cheaply. Learn how to maximise your highest leverage point as a product manager well before any code is written. Get actionable tips on how to create a culture where product people are supported to learn fast, focus on customers, and are praised for disproving hypotheses. Hear how product managers can shift leadership to share a common language and appetite for risk and learning.
Bradley Scott
The Tyranny of Product Management
Bradley spent the last 15 years in SaaS start-up and scale ups and has held various product management and engineering leadership roles in NZ and the USA throughout that time. These include General Manager of Product at Xero, VP of Product at Fiserv (M-Com) and Chief operating officer at UneeQ. In addition to permanent roles he has coached leaders at, and consulted to Tradify, Sharesies, Unleashed Software, Groov, and others. He is currently Chief technology officer at construction tech company, Mooven and likes to bring a blend of technical, product and organisational perspectives to any ambitious NZ SaaS organisation he is able to help.
The tech-cession has ended the boom-era of entitlement within the product management profession. This talk is a critical assessment and cautionary tale about avoiding dogma and making pragmatic choices to benefit product teams, codebases and customers. It will traverse recent events across the industry, highlight traps that well meaning product managers have and do fall into, and tips on how to avoid them. The talk takes aim at the risks of hyper specialisation and challenges product managers to become chameleons that can meet the present challenges of their organisation.